I just had a look at some of the documents accompanying the launch of the EUs proposed FTT. One of the documents describes the data they used to estimate the amount of revenue that the tax would generate - it's Annexe 12. In it they mention a source of data that I hadn't found before. It's the
Federation of European Securities Exchanges which provides tons of data about financial activity in Europe. Of course, I downloaded the data from
their website for all the years since 2003 and then just added up all the numbers in the different tables - something that apparently nobody bothers to do. For 2011, I just took the numbers for the first 8 months of the year (till august) and multiplied by 1.5 to get a prediction. The numbers are totally mindblowing. Here there are (just click on the figure to download a close up version) :
Yes, those numbers really are in Millions of Euros. And yes, the total for 2011 looks set to reach €638 trillion. (€638 000 000 000 000). The markets haven't quite reached the peak of 2008 when the total reached nearly €650 trillion, but it's looking pretty healthy. Certainly a lot more healthy than the rest of the economy.
Yes, I think that there is some potential for taxation revenues in there. Let's do it.
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