We Need a Global Tax on Financial Speculation

By Amitabh Pal, December 11, 2009

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown unveiled an eminently sensible proposal this week: to place a 50 percent tax on all bankers’ bonuses in his country. But another, even more sensible idea of his last month was shot down by other nations, notably the United States.

This is a global tax on speculative financial transactions, also often called the “Tobin Tax” after the Nobel-winning economist James Tobin, who first came up with the idea. The notion has been around since the 1970s in one form or the other (I have a decade-old poster for the tax up in my office), but Brown deserves credit for attempting to resuscitate it.

We Need a Global Tax on Financial Speculation | The Progressive