IMF Studies How to Pay for Financial Sector Rescues
IMF Survey online
January 11, 2010
* Goal to reduce systemic risk, improve burden sharing
* Range of options, including financial sector taxation, being discussed
* Measures need to balance taxation and regulation
Last September, leaders of the Group of Twenty (G-20) industrial and emerging market countries, meeting in Pittsburgh, asked the IMF to prepare a “range of options” for “how the financial sector could make a fair and substantial contribution toward paying for any burdens associated with government interventions” to counteract financial sector crises.
IMF First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky leads the Fund group tasked with preparing the report.
In this interview, Lipsky explains how the IMF will go about its work as it studies various approaches. The final report will be presented to the G-20 Leaders next June, with a preliminary version to be discussed at the G-20 Finance Ministers meeting in April.
IMF Survey online: There’s a lot of interest in the work that the Fund is doing on taxation of the financial sector. What exactly is this about?
First of all, I want to be clear about the subject and scope of our report. We are responding to the G-20 Leaders’ request for an analysis of the various ways in which the financial sector could help to defray the costs of public sector crisis support. Since you mentioned “taxation,” I would stress that while this may provide a convenient shorthand reference for the project, our report will encompass other possible funding sources, including some that resemble user fees.
Although we will focus principally on the funding challenges posed by potential future crises, we also will examine the efforts underway to recoup the cost of the current crisis. Of course, there are many links between these two, but the analytical approach—and the appropriate policy choices—inevitably will differ in each case.
At the same time, our study will examine which institutions and/or activities should be included, and in the case of future crises, whether a fund should be created in advance of any prospective use. In analyzing the various policy options, important considerations will include bolstering systemic efficiency and effectiveness, including by removing existing distortions and by avoiding the introduction of new ones.
...IMF Survey online: What about the idea of a Tobin tax on foreign currency transactions, or a more general financial transactions tax, which some have proposed?
Of course we will examine all worthwhile proposals. However, the original “Tobin tax” proposal—first suggested by the late Nobel laureate James Tobin—was limited to foreign exchange transactions, and was intended to reduce the volume of such transactions, not to raise revenue. While some contemporary advocates of a transaction tax view it as a means to shrink the size of the financial sector, others are looking to such a measure as a possible source of finance for development purposes. Whatever the merits of this approach, and the worthiness of the overall goal, this is not exactly the issue that the G-20 Leaders asked us to analyze.