European Securities Trading : €1000 trillion in 2011

I love the ECB. They provide all sorts of wonderful data on their website. For example, if you go here, you can download a pdf file with a list of all "Transactions processed by central securities depositories" (go to page 4). If you play around a bit, like me, you can download the raw data from here. 

And here are the numbers for 2005 to 2011. My previous data only went up to 2010 when the total value was a whopping €916 trillion. Here's the new data for 2011 - sorted by the volume of transactions in millions of Euros.

As you can see, the financial crisis doesn't seem to be having too much of an effect on the traders. In 2011 they reached a very impressive €995.3 trillion - up a healthy 8% on the previous year. Is it OK if I call that a round €1000 trillion?

All this is very nice, because as reported recently, François Hollande has just instigated a 0.01% tax on this sort of trading. Applied across Europe it would generate €100 billion a year. And with a more generous 0.1%, we could rake in a trillion a year. That would limit the need for austerity a bit.

What are we waiting for?