Like many taxes this is far removed from the basis of taxing those who gain the most from society. It is popular as Jo Public has no understanding of who ultimately foots the bill. He thinks that only the wealthy and "banks" will suffer. I suppose if he has a DB pension scheme he is not worried about pension funds. But his bank charges and insurance will go up not to mention everything else which relies on financial transactions such as all imports and exports.

Too many politicians think that extra stealth taxes can be introduced as though there is a bottomless pit. But they al have to be paid by the populations, and they all transfer waelth from the private sector to the state. We just cannot afford to pay for all of the useless things the state does. So halve the EEC budget for a start.

Even if the only the banks paid, do not forget tyhat someone owns the banks, and they are really the ones paying. Pension funds, the taxpayer.......

Frank Randall: It has to be the opposite of unilateral. Unilateral would mean that e.g. UK would tax alone, whereas what is needed if such a tax were imposed, it would need to be multilateral or more properly universal.

Nevertheless, viewing, for instance, the huge volume of algorithm-driven high frequency trading on miniscule margins that seems to benefit no one except investment banks

=============

Easy to show this is not the case by counter example.

Lets say we get rid of the speculators and middle men. We do this for the FX market. So what's the effect?

First if you want to go to Spain, you need to find someone in the Eurozone who wants to come to the UK, in order to exchange your GBP for EUR. You can't go to a middle man like a bank (bureau d'exchange or a speculator). Isn't life going to be wonderful

What the middle men and speculators do, and at a remarkably narrow margin is provide liquidity. They will take your money off you, and take the risk until they can offload it to someone else. That's what the speculators do as a service, plus make money if they can for their investors.

If more shares were still in the hands of long-term investors,

==============

Or why don't you propose that you can't sell shares unless you have held them for 10 years? You get the long term investor, but you also get the long term fraud.

The critical difference between Robin Hood and Tobin, is that the income of R Hood's bishops and barons was 100% local - if it wasn't generated in that precise locality, it wouldn't be generated at all. Tobin aims to tax an activity which has 100% no local connection. It can and would be generated anywhere in the world.