The Evil Soros Gets His Financial Transaction Tax

Germany, France and nine other eurozone countries have been given the green light to impose a financial transaction tax.


EU finance ministers gave their approval at a meeting in Brussels, allowing 11 states to pursue a levy on financial transactions. The UK abstained in the vote alongside Luxembourg and the Czech Republic.

Eleven countries won the EU's backing for a financial transaction tax (FTT), with Germany, France, Italy and Spain adding their names to eurozone neighbors Austria, Portugal, Belgium, Estonia, Greece, Slovakia and Slovenia, reports The Guardian.

Who is behind this tax? George Soros.

I reported back in October 2011, that Soros was aggressively promoting the tax: 

In his 2005 book, George Soros on Globalization, Soros writes not only in favor of the tax, but discuses how to "mobilize public opinion" for such a tax: 

The globalization of financial markets has given capital an unfair advantage over other sources of taxation, a tax on financial transactions would redress the balance...the tax ought to be extended to all markets, not just currency markets... Collection has to be worldwide, including tax havens. How could it be enforced? The collecting country must be given a portion of the proceeds...To mobilize public opinion of increased international assistance, the proposal must not only show how the money will be raised but how it will be spent.

[...]  It's fair to ask why a trader like Soros is so hot for a financial transactions tax. But once you understand the type of trader Soros is, the tax demand is obvious. Soros is a position trader. The financial transaction tax would hurt short-term traders/market makers, who trade on thin margins--the opposite of the position trader that Soros is. The tax would make markets less efficient and less liquid. Soros knows this, during a speech in 2001, he said:

I think there is a case for a Tobin tax ... (but) it is not at all clear to me that a Tobin tax would reduce volatility in the currency markets. It is true that it may discourage currency speculation but it would also reduce the liquidity of the marketplace.

With markets less liquid, the market makers that make the markets liquid and efficient will be hampered by a Tobin tax (they will now need a spread of over 1%) and this will create more profit opportunities for the position trading that Soros does.