EUROPE has a chequered history when it comes to taxing financial transactions. Britain has a centuries-old stamp duty on share purchases but wants to protect the City from further fiscal burdens. Sweden tried a tax in the 1980s and dropped it when share-trading emigrated. France and Italy have recently imposed different sorts of financial-transaction taxes (FTTs). But at the year’s first meeting of European finance ministers, France, along with ten other like-minded members of the European Union, dusted off a moribund plan to introduce a harmonised FTT.Countries like Britain and Luxembourg, which lives off its asset-management industry, have long thwarted attempts to introduce an EU-wide FTT. In response, in 2014, a coalition of more enthusiastic EU members announced its intention to start taxing something financial in 2016. Since then the 11—Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain—have squabbled over what and how.Should a wide range of financial instruments including derivatives be taxed, as Austria and Germany favoured? France, though as keen as the next country to humble the moneymen, wanted to exclude most derivatives: its banks have at least a quarter of the European market in equity-based ones. Should the location of the company issuing the security determine whether a transaction was taxable and what country...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1A1QqRv
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