On the Tobin Tax

Abstract

This paper clarifies why a transaction tax, such as the Tobin Tax, can stabilize financial markets. In markets that are already fairly deep, relatively small changes in trading volume are unlikely to have any impact (positive or negative) on volatility. Thus, a Tobin Tax can potentially have a stabilizing effect on international currency markets not because it reduces the excessive volume of transactions of speculators, but because it can slow down the speed with which market traders react to changes in prices of currencies. Moreover, it can lower their elasticity of future price expectations with respect to current price changes, which also has a stabilizing effect. Thus, to the extent that a Tobin Tax causes traders in financial markets to delay their decisions, a few ‘grains of sand in the wheels of international finance’ can indeed be stabilizing. Whether or not that is sufficient to prevent speculative attacks on currencies is a different matter.     

Banks as Continuous Reinvention

Of the several debates that revolve around the work of the economic historian and political economist Karl Polanyi, one that continues to exercise minds concerns his analysis of, and political attitudes toward, post-war capitalism and the welfare state. Simplified a little, it is a debate with two sides. To borrow Iván Szelényi's terms, one side constructs a ‘hard’ Karl Polanyi, the other a ‘soft’ one. The former advocated a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms. He was a radical socialist for whom the market should never be the dominant mechanism of economic coordination. His ‘soft’ alter ego insisted that the market system remain essentially intact but be complemented by redistributive mechanisms. The ‘double movement’ – the central thesis of his ‘Great Transformation’ – acts, in this reading, as a self-correcting mechanism that moderates the excesses of market fundamentalism; its author was positioned within the social-democratic mainstream for which the only realistic desirable goal is a regulated form of capitalism. In terms of textual evidence there is much to be said for both interpretations. In this article I suggest a different approach, one that focuses upon the meaning of Polanyi's concepts in relation to their socio-political and intellectual environment.     

ASSET PRICE BUBBLES,LIQUIDITY PREFERENCE AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE

In his Treatise on Money, Keynes relied on two different themes to argue that the interest rate need not rise with rising levels of expenditure. One of these was the elasticity of the money supply, and the other was the interaction between financial and industrial circulation. A decrease (increase) in what Keynes called the bear position was similar in its impact to that of a policy‐induced increase (decrease) in the money supply. In the General Theory, this second line of argument lost much of its force as it became reformulated under the rubric of Keynes liquidity preference theory of interest. Assuming that the expected return on capital adjusts to the interest rate in short‐period equilibrium, Keynes ignored the effect of bull or bear sentiment in equity markets as a second‐order complication that can be ignored in analyzing the equilibrium level of investment and output. The objective of this paper is to go back to this old theme from the Treatise and underscore its importance for Keynesian theory of the business cycle.     

Short Interest,Returns, and Unfavorable Fundamental Information

Several months before information becomes public, the level of short interest contains value‐relevant information about publicly traded corporations. Short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. This informational content is stronger for stocks that are harder to short. We also find that nearly half of the well‐known cross‐sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns is related to future changes in firms’ value‐relevant information. Our results suggest that short interest predicts future returns, in part, due to short sellers’ ability to uncover unfavorable information about firms.     

Economic Volatility and Capital Account Liberalization in Emerging Countries

Economic volatility has increased drastically in the age of financial liberalization. The tendency among mainstream economists has been to explain this trend by government misdeeds and various market imperfections. For instance, government overspending was the main culprit in the first generation models of currency crises. Following the Asian crisis the emphasis shifted onto capital flow reversals, and arguments based on the ‘moral hazard’ problems began to replace the emphasis on the monetized government deficits. This paper outlines an explanation of economic volatility that is not based on moral hazard problems or other market distortions. Two stylized facts associated with the aftermath of financial and capital account liberalization are singled out for emphasis and brought together in the context of a macroeconomic framework that draws from Keynes’ Treatise. These are: (i) liquidity preference becomes intertwined with currency substitution, producing a macroeconomic destabilizer that explains procyclical changes in bank credit independently of moral hazard problems; and (ii) asset prices become fairly easy to predict, stimulating destabilizing ‘trend’ speculation by foreign investors, which means that profit seeking and market rationality might lie behind erratic shifts in capital flows.