By Willem Buiter
Published: September 1 2009 20:19
Lord Turner, chairman of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, has set the cat among the financial pigeons by making highly critical comments about the City of London and financial intermediation in general. He recommended some drastic remedies, and suggested considering a global tax on financial transactions – a generalised Tobin tax. James Tobin proposed a tax on foreign exchange transactions to stabilise floating exchange rates and achieve greater national monetary policy autonomy in a world of increasing financial integration.
The Tobin tax was never implemented, which is just as well from the perspective of its declared objectives: it could have increased exchange rate instability and was unlikely materially to enhance national monetary policy autonomy. From a political perspective, it may be more surprising that it was never implemented. Even at a very low rate, the Tobin tax could have been a massive government revenue raiser. Distortionary taxes that raise large revenues, including transaction taxes on financial and real assets – such as the UK’s stamp duty on property – are, after all, a common feature of the political landscape.
What problem would a Tobin tax on financial transactions solve? Lord Turner asserts, in an interview with Prospect magazine, that the UK financial sector has grown too big; that some financial sector activity is worthless from a social perspective; that the sector is destabilising the British economy; and that new taxes may be required to curb excessive profits and pay in the sector. “If you want to stop excessive pay in a swollen financial sector you have to reduce the size of that sector or apply special taxes to its pre-remuneration profit,” he says. Even if all these assertions are correct, they do not imply the need for a Tobin tax.
Economics teaches us that taxes and other public interventions to correct distortions and other market failures should be targeted directly at the distortion or failure in question. What distortion is a tax on financial transactions targeted at?
The financial sector is too big throughout the overdeveloped world in part because much of it enjoys a free state guarantee against default on its unsecured debt. Retail deposits are explicitly insured, but at premiums that imply a taxpayer subsidy. Other counterparties of banks and other systemically important financial institutions also benefit from implicit default guarantees. The cost of capital to the banking sector is subsidised, causing the sector to be too large.
The solution is clear, and it is not a tax on financial transactions: bring default risk back into the calculations of unsecured creditors and other counterparties of the financial sector.
This would eliminate the capital subsidy to the industry. The obvious way to do this is through the creation of a “special resolution regime” as an alternative to bankruptcy for all systemically important financial institutions.
This would permit their unsecured creditors and other counterparties to be forcibly and swiftly converted into shareholders, until the institutions are adequately capitalised. It must be possible to achieve such a mandatory recapitalisation by unsecured creditors and counterparties for any institution overnight, and without interrupting normal business. A regularly updated “will” for each systemically important financial institution would eliminate any remaining “too big, too interconnected, too complex and too international to fail” obstacles to the Darwinian discipline of the market, which has been sorely missed in the financial sector.
I believe that efficient financial intermediation and a dynamic financial sector are essential for the proper functioning of any decentralised market economy; I also believe that too much financial sector activity is not only socially worthless, but actually harmful.
Take financial derivatives. A financial derivative is a bet created by the issuer whose payoff depends on some aspect of the performance of an underlying financial instrument. If the bet pays out when the buyer of the derivative is worse off, we call it insurance. If the bet pays off when the buyer of the derivative is no worse off, we call it speculation. Speculation need not be a problem; it is a necessary feature of the efficient allocation of risk, as long as only one party to the transaction is engaged in it. To tame the rampant excessive speculation in the derivatives markets, it is sufficient to require that at least one of the parties involved in a derivatives transaction has an insurable interest. The Tobin tax does nothing to achieve this. An example: credit default swaps (securities that pay the holder when a bond defaults) can be issued in amounts much larger than the value of the underlying bonds.
Anyone who owns CDS in excess of the value of the bonds he owns benefits when the debt defaults, creating obvious moral hazard. The issuer of CDS whose value is much larger than the underlying bonds has the opposite moral hazard: there is an incentive artificially to reduce or eliminate default risk. The simplest solution is to require that CDS pay out only if the same amount of the underlying bond is presented.
“Churning” can be a problem for individual savers. Excessive transaction volumes can be caused by perverse incentive systems that link the remuneration of traders – acting as agents for owners of wealth – to trading volumes. Even here, the right solution is not transaction taxes but regulation restricting the undesirable features of these contracts directly. If excessive pay in the financial sector is a problem, tax pay.
I agree with Lord Turner that the UK financial sector – too large to fail and possibly also too large to save – has become a destabilising force for the UK. Part of the solution to this “Iceland problem” is for the UK to give up sterling and join the euro instead. A serious global reserve currency provides some protection against bank runs that could bring down a solvent but illiquid cross-border banking system when the country is stuck with a minor-league currency such as sterling. The euro would not help, of course, if the underlying problem is the insolvency of the banking sector and limited fiscal capacity. The only solution then is to limit the size of the banking sector, say by making capital requirements of individual banks a function not only of their own size, but of the size of the total banking balance sheet relative to the government’s capacity to raise taxes and cut spending. Again, a Tobin tax would not achieve this. Transactions are the wrong metric for size here.
One can share Lord Turner’s diagnosis that the UK financial sector was allowed to grow too large and to get out of control – almost a law unto itself – without accepting the Tobin tax as part of the solution. Tobin was a genius, but the Tobin tax was probably his one daft idea. Creating a viable and socially useful UK financial sector does not require this unfortunate fiscal intervention.
The writer is a professor at the London School of Economics. His Maverecon blog appears on FT.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.
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