I propose that the Congressional leadership re-introduce the Trouble Asset Relief Program accompanied by a major new policy: a small tax on securities market transactions. This will accomplish the political goal of aiming a silver bullet into the heart of the (understandable) popular outrage that blocked passage of the TARP bill on Monday. It will simultaneously accomplish the fiscal goal of raising revenue in the future. This is revenue that the federal government would have sorely needed even before the bailout arose and will need even more if the taxpayer is to be protected against the risk of heavily subsidizing the financial sector.

A tax on securities market transactions might sound like a wild populist policy that would damage the functioning of the economy. But in fact it is far more sensible than such populist measures as banning short sales, which has already been tried (to no avail).

Proposals for financial transactions taxes have a distinguished pedigree, going back at least as far as Keynes.  Best-known is the Tobin tax proposal, by Nobel Prize winner James Tobin, which was specifically aimed at volatility in foreign exchange markets. More relevant to what I am proposing are two articles by the pre-Treasury Larry Summers: “A Few Good Taxes” and “When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for a Securities Transactions Tax” (1989).   Add to the list of proponents another of Nobel Prize Winner, Joe Stiglitz.

There is extensive experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), especially in other countries.  There have also been quite a few studies of their effects. Often the motivation for such proposals is to reduce short-term speculative turnover:   a tax of 0.1% means nothing to a long-term investor, but is a strong disincentive to those traders who hold their positions for only minutes or hours.  The idea is that reducing short-term speculation will reduce volatility.  On the other hand, defenders of unfettered financial markets often argue that such a tax will reduce liquidity and thus hurt the customers who depend on the market.

The general historical experience seems to be that there is no discernible effect on volatility (though a couple of studies find effects on volatility, either upward  or downward).   In other words, the tax might not help the functioning of the financial markets — the original motivation – but neither does it hurt, according to a majority of the studies.  In some cases the volume of trading within the country is affected.  But what the tax does does usually do is raise money for the Treasury.  

The UK long had a securities transactions tax, known as a stamp duty, which was set at 0.5% in 1986.  Sweden introduced a 0.5 per cent tax on the purchase and sale of equities in 1984 — prompting some financial trading to move offshore – and kept it until 1991.  (Froot and Campbell, studied these two examples in a 1994 book that I edited.   The Swedish case is particularly relevant to the current US context because the popular motivation there was to “take down a peg” high-earning speculators.)    Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong have a long history with securities transactions taxes, and India introduced one in 2004; in these cases there were not significant reductions in either price volatility or market turnover.  Other countries that have had financial turnover taxes of at least 0.1% include Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore.  (Germany abolished its turnover tax in 1991, and Japan in 1999.)   In addition there are other countries that impose smaller fees.

Even the United States had a STT until 1965, and to this day imposes an SEC fee of .0033%.  Thus we have already lost our virginity !

An important potential drawback, if the US were to impose a more substantial transactions tax alone, is that it might drive financial business offshore.   There is an answer to this point.  As noted, many countries already have taxes on financial transactions. Furthermore, lots would love to cooperate with the United States in an international program to harmonize such taxes internationally. This is precisely the sort of project in which many abroad have long asked Americans to participate, but which we have not hitherto wanted to do.

The level and longevity of the tax might be adjusted to achieve the goal of Section 134 of the TARP bill: that the taxpayer recoup the costs of the bailout. A 2004 study by the Congressional Research Service reported that an 0.5% tax on stock transfers could raise $65 billion a year.  Others have produced higher revenue estimates.   A tax extended to bonds and derivatives (especially derivatives!) would of course raise more.   Remember that one does not compare this annual revenue to the $700 billion headline cost of the bailout.  Rather, one compares the present discounted value of the annual flow of revenue to however much of TARP’s $700 billion is left over after the government (we hope) collects something on the troubled loans and also recoups something on warrants obtained from the participating banks.

The tax might on the margin contribute to a shrinking of the size of the financial sector; but this shrinking needs to happen anyway, as Ken Rogoff has pointed out. And most important politically, it would give expression in a non-damaging way to the blood lust that the public feels toward Wall Street, a venting that needs to take place if the bailout bill is going to be approved.

[To any readers who wish to post comments:  I suggest you go to the RGE version of this post.]

In time of war, there is a tendency for both political parties to rally around the president, as we saw (all too well) in Iraq after September 11. In time of financial panic, there is often a similar inclination. The two presidential candidates, for example, are being careful in their statements. I don’t blame them. The issues are too complex to be taken on inside the context of a political campaign. Both candidates realize that the danger of a verbal misstep that the other side can try to blame for worsening the crisis is far greater than the likelihood that either one will come up with a brilliant solution that will gain widespread support or will solve the problem, let alone both.

Someone this week asked me what I thought of policy-makers who ex ante profess a free-market ideology and acute sensitivity to the dangers of moral hazard from financial bailouts, but who toss that ideology overboard when faced with a financial crisis.  The reference was to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s lobbying this week in support of a rescue for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big home mortgage agencies, following on the rescue of Bear Stearns in March.   My reply was:  “They say there are no atheists in foxholes.   Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in financial crises.”

There are more egregious cases than Hank Paulson of inconsistencies between ex ante promises by policy-makers not to bail out and ex post bailouts when disaster strikes.    (Indeed, some amount of change in position may even be rational for an office-holder, though I would draw the line at false statements.)    I reserve my disdain for those who go around lecturing others on the evils of bailouts, only to out-do the officials they criticized when their own turn in the hot-seat comes.  

An example I have in mind concerns the members of the starting team in the Bush Administration who had lectured the Clinton Administration on the evils of its allegedly excessive bailouts of emerging markets in the 1990s, only to engage in worse when they themselves were faced with the Argentine crisis that began in 2001.  There was no particular reason to rescue the Kirchner government.   Argentina in 2003 would have been the perfect place to refrain from rolling over an IMF program, thereby putting a limit on the moral hazard problem.   The Clinton Treasury had done this with Russia in August 1998 despite high costs in terms of systemic contagion.   Yet the Bush White House continued to push the IMF to bail out Argentina.  Apparently the failing lay in simple inexperience and lack of awareness that any such choices are always difficult.   (See pages 9-11 of my article on Managing Financial Crises, in the Cato Journal, Summer 2007.)    The Administration was very much following in the footsteps of the Reagan Administration, which talked tough at first when the international debt crisis hit in 1982 but which then participated in comprehensive IMF-led bailouts of Latin American debtors who had been pursuing far worse macroeconomic policies than the emerging market governments of the 1990s crises.  

Incidentally, before writing this blog post, I checked into the World War II origins of the sentence “There are no atheists in foxholes.”     I discovered to my surprise that this expression was intended, and is still considered, as a put-down of atheists, and that their lobby protests its use.  

Of course the proposition is not literally true; indeed some soldiers lose their pre-existing belief in God when confronted with the horror of war.   But let us stipulate that those who suddenly face death more often find religion than lose it.  What strikes me as odd is that the expression is apparently normally interpreted as meaning that people who profess atheism don’t really mean it, and that their true colors come out under pressure.     I had, apparently erroneously, thought rather the reverse.   (Indeed, Richard Dawkins argues that vast numbers of people who would no more bet on the existence of God than on the existence of the Easter Bunny, nonetheless call themselves “agnostics” rather than atheists, to avoid rocking the boat.)   

I had always taken the expression to mean that mankind’s hunger for religious beliefs comes from a desperate desire for divine intervention – or, failing that, comfort – when confronting death.  Something more along the lines “There are no unsoiled underpants in foxholes.”     I am in sympathy with the character in a novel who said “That maxim, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’ it’s not an argument against atheism — it’s an argument against foxholes.” 

So what’s my point?    Not to argue that governments should intervene always  (nor that they should intervene never).  The lesson for government officials is that wherever they choose to draw the bailout line – one hopes the line strikes an intelligent balance between the short-run advantages of ameliorating a serious financial crisis and the longer-run disadvantages of moral hazard — they should think through the system ahead of time.  They should take the appropriate regulatory precautions during the boom times, which correspond to the bailouts that will inevitably come during the busts.   

Long ago, the United States worked out the approximate right answer for banks:  there will always be rescue of small depositors ex post when banks run into serious trouble, and so under our system, (i) deposit insurance provides formal guarantees ex ante and (ii) banks must pay the price ex ante through reserve requirements, capital requirements, and active regulatory oversight.  What we now need to do is design the analogous sort of system for non-banks.

It should not come as a surprise to high officials that there are such things as financial crises anymore than it should come as a surprise to soldiers that there are such things as bombs.   Human nature must be accepted for what it is.   But in the case of  high officials, it shouldn’t be necessary for them to alter their fundamental beliefs when crisis strikes, in the absence of truly unforeseeable developments.