Why don´t Europeans agree first...they seem worlds apart!

Sir Peer SteinBrück, the German finance minister, in “A tax on trading to share the costs of the crisis”, September 25, proposes a tax on financial transactions of 0.05 percent that could “yield up to $690bn a year.

But, Bernard Kouchner, the French minister of foreign affairs in “A tax on finance to help the world´s poor” September 17, he spoke about a tax of 0.005 percent that would “raise €30bn”.

Why don’t the Europeans agree first among them what they want to propose to the world? Now, they seem worlds apart.

That said before any tax of this sort, the world´s poor, and most of the rest of the world, would benefit more from taking away that financial tax that the current capital regulations for banks represent in that, above of what the market already charges for risk differentials, it creates arbitrary costs, far from minuscule, that directly taxes those more prone to be considered as more risky, like the poor and the development countries. http://bit.ly/4yX7k1

Snooties abound

Sir FT’s front page November 30 voices Peer Steinbrück’s, Germany’s finance minister, accusation that bankers are “snooty”. Of course he must be right, almost by definition but, before he throws the first stone, he does well looking closer at those nearer to him. If “snootiness”, a word that I never heard before but immediately felt intimate with, has to apply to anyone I would have to say it is to all the bank regulators who in self congratulatory ways thought they hade tamed the risk in banking for ever with all their Basel inventions.