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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, TOO BIG IS UGLY
Hazel Henderson
NOVEMBER 2009 (IPS) - Since the financial crises of 2008-2009, many experts have called for the downsizing of the bloated financial sectors and curbing their trading activities and ever-more mysterious financial "products" such as credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) whose totals soared to $658 trillion of these bets between traders in the few biggest banks in the world. We now know that CDSs, CDOs and all the alphabet soup of such "financial products" were really bets that should be relegated to betting parlors and regulated by gaming commissions, writes Hazel Henderson, president of Ethical Markets Media.
Curbing excessive trading in our global financial casinos, which brought such pain to Main Streets across the world, has now become essential. Small taxes on all financial transactions can slow down and reduce the staggering volumes of trading today. Economist James Tobin promoted this idea in the late 1970s and many experts assessed this tax, found it beneficial and reviewed various ways of collecting it.
Recently, Lord Adair Turner, head of Britain's Financial Services Authority, asserted that financial sectors had become overgrown and questioned their social utility. His remedies included imposing a financial transactions tax on all trades. All such proposals, including my own (The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives, Elsevier UK, 1995), have been howled down by financial sector players, as well as their World Bank and International Monetary Found handmaidens. Now is the time to bring trading back down to Earth.
(*) Hazel Henderson, president of Ethical Markets Media ( www.ethicalmarkets.com), authored The Politics of the Solar Age (1981), Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators ( www.calvert-henderson.com).
//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND,
THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM// (END/2009)
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