Taxing Wall Street: the Tax Justice Network December 2020 podcast

In this episode of the Tax Justice Network’s monthly podcast, the Taxcast:

This month we take a look at the transformative power of financial transactions taxes. There’s a chance that New York, home to two of the world’s largest stock exchanges, could be about to set an important precedent. We go to Kenya to look at its experience with a financial transactions tax. And we see how much further the tax could go.

Plus: we discuss three major waves of change in 2020: the black lives matter protests, Trump’s departure from the Whitehouse and the end of the Brexiteers dream. (Subscribe to the Taxcast via email by contacting the Taxcast producer on naomi [at] taxjustice.net)

Transcript available here (some is automated and may not be 100% accurate)

Featuring:

• Economist Francis Karugu
• Economist, lawyer and senior Tax Justice Network advisor Jim Henry
• Economist Keval Bharadia
• John Christensen, Tax Justice Network
• Produced and presented by the Tax Justice Network’s Naomi Fowler

“It’s interesting that you know, now the gospel is spreading from Africa to the more developed world that have been overtaken by the likes of Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa in implementing a robin hood tax.”

~ Economist Francis Karugu

A Financial Transactions Tax is “a brilliant, easily collected tax. It doesn’t cause any pain to investors. I mean there are damn few alternatives. Do you want us to really just fire all the state workers shutting down schools and laying off teachers, you know, how do you get Wall Street to pay its fair share here?!”

~ Economist, lawyer and senior Tax Justice Network advisor Jim Henry

The value of global capital flowing through financial markets is actually 28 trillion pounds per day. if we just charge a 0.05% tax rate, we’re looking at 14 billion pounds per day to fund reparations and systems change.”

~ Economist Keval Bharadia

The Brexiteer project was to break the European Union’s resolve, to break the whole project of trying to create an international rules-based trading order, in other words, to create a kind of globalisation where there were no rules, no frameworks for cooperation. And that project has failed.“

~ John Christensen, Tax Justice Network

Further Reading:

Congress passes defense bill with big ramifications for AML, whistleblowers

You can read Keval Bharadia’s paper “Recalibrating financial transaction tax policy narratives” here. You can look at his slides on Recalibrating financial transactions tax policy narratives for reparations here.

You can read about the efforts towards a financial transactions tax in New York here.

The Tax Justice Network’s Financial secrecy Index is available here

Africa’s battle against financial secrecy is here.

You can listen to the Tax Justice Network’s Rachel Etter-Phoya speaking on Africa and the Financial Secrecy Index here:

Want more Taxcasts? The full playlist is here. Or here.

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