Though the European Union is considering the viability of a Financial Transaction Tax or Tobin tax, it is unlikely to be implemented given the current economic situation. Excerpt from a working paper by Daniel Chorzelski, Lukas Doerfler, Alex Hodbod, and Hannes Timischl, students in the International Trade, Finance, and Development...
Background The idea of taxing speculative financial transactions was initially proposed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1936 as a mechanism to reduce uninformed short-term speculative trading and thereby reduce the excessive volatility that the financial sector caused for the real economy. Keynes was concerned that the sheer...
