August 28, 2015
Well, that may not be what they intended to point out, but it is in fact what they pointed out, according to the International Business Times. According to the paper:
“Critics point to the results in France and Italy, which have their own financial tax regimes. In Italy, average daily trading in Italian stocks dropped 29.7 percent in January and February 2014, compared to the average for the same period in 2013, Credit Suisse trading strategy analysts said last year.”
The tax rate on trades on exchanges was 0.1 percent on the transaction. If transactions costs averaged 0.3 percent before the tax, then this increased the cost per transaction by 33 percent to 0.4 percent. While the cost per trade will have risen by one third, the critics tell us that trading volume fell by 29.7 percent.
This means that Italian investors are actually spending 6.5 percent less on stock trades now than they did before the tax was put in place (0.703*1.33= 0.935). Since traders don’t on average make money on trading (some win and others lose), investors are actually saving money as a result of the tax. The full cost of the tax is therefore coming out of the pockets of the financial industry in the form of reduced trading volume. This would explain why they are critics of the tax.
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