Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-01-19-Speech-3-226"
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"en.20000119.8.3-226"2
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"Madam President, although some of the aims of the Tobin tax are fairly worthy of support, introducing the tax exclusively within the territory of the European Union, as the first area of the world to do so, would sound the death knell for the European currency markets. If the world’s other important currency trading areas were to be excluded from the Tobin tax, the fact that tax was liable to be paid in Europe would lead to currency dealing moving to those areas. This has already been made clear a number times in this debate. It is not enough that all the world’s industrialised countries should be included in the scheme, as then currency trading would move to tax havens outside that group of countries. There should therefore be a universal application: it is not enough that the G7 countries or the other industrialised countries are involved. On the other hand, it would be so difficult to bring the scheme into force everywhere in the world at precisely the same time – and personally speaking, I do not believe we can achieve this – that the Tobin tax dream might as well be buried. Furthermore, although there might be international consensus on the introduction of the scheme, the question would remain regarding how the tax revenue would be distributed. The world’s currency dealing centres will hardly agree to the tax revenue being used, for example, for a variety of well-meaning, UN-backed purposes throughout the world without a considerable amount of the revenue remaining with them.
With regard to the Tobin tax as a means of preventing future currency crises, it has to be realised that the causes of a currency being overvalued cannot be averted through taxation. For that reason, as Mr Karas also said, we should give more attention to the policies that lead to a certain currency being overvalued in relation to its actual potential value. This again would require measures to regulate the exportation and importation of capital; otherwise it would not be possible to focus on policies in this way. Although it seems a reasonable scheme, the Tobin tax is not without its problems, even if there should be agreement as to its implementation, which I do not believe there will.
It has to be remembered that money at present is first and foremost information, and that the global economy will, in the future, rotate more and more on the basis of information and intellectual capital. For that reason, the uninterrupted flow of assets in massive volumes between the world’s financial centres is not merely speculative activity, which has nothing to do with the real economy. If this ‘feedback’ mechanism, which gives users the opportunity to make choices, were hampered by measures such as the Tobin tax, mistaken decisions might be made that turned out to be so costly in terms of the economic consequences that the tax would never be able to make up for it. Hence, as Mr Karas has stated to his credit, our Group is resolutely opposed to the introduction of the Tobin tax."@en1
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