Financial transaction tax
It's possible to have an informed debate about FTT. Neither of the sides ever tried to do it: one side doesn't understand how the market functions, while the other side cares about nothing but their revenues.
Obviously state version of FTT can't work at all (although I would personally find it profoundly satisfying to watch a bunch of HFTs racing to build microwave links between Chicago and, say, Houston), while a federal version probably would collect less than "current volume x proposed FTT rate". On the other hand shouting about a quarter cent tax being the end of capitalism is silly; South Korea stamp duty tax is 25 bps for sales (roughly 25x proposed NJ version) and it probably collects 5-10 bil USD a year at least.
What makes recent arguments go from silly to egregious is the "Coalition to Prevent the Taxing of Retirement Savings" name. It's remarkably disingenuous to claim that inherently low turnover pension funds would absorb anything but the most minuscule proportion of FTT. In fact the most sensible strategy of just putting your retirement savings into a bunch of big ETFs would generate absolutely negligible amount of tax. It's not rocket science to figure who will be the highest tax payers: HFTs, high turnover quant funds and day trading community.
A sensible approach to FTT would be to try and figure out which of these participants ultimately provide a valuable service to the market and how to target a tax in a way to minimize the impact on liquidity. Given huge inefficiencies in US equities market structure, it should be possible to design the tax in a way that it will actually decrease the costs of trading for institutional investors, like pension funds.
Given the technology we have today why should a tax be assessed just because a server resides in a data center in your state. Since the actual trading happens electronically the Computational capacity could be put into the cloud. Then where do you tax it as you move capacity as needed. Could all servers move to Bermuda or Niagara falls Canada? If the Dow was under 20K would we even have this conversation. If we have a correction will the conversation go away? Murphy of all people should be smart enough to know his past compatriots will avoid this tax at all costs.
Editor at Global Association of Risk Professionals
4 年Good point about the quality of the dialogue. A recent article by me covers arguments on all sides. "Will a Financial Transaction Tax Put Markets at Risk?" https://www.garp.org/#!/risk-intelligence/market/financial-markets/a1Z1W000005W7lZUAS
Absolutely; we could just scrap queuing and the limit order book all together.