It's also possible to pick out just the transactions that occured in France, as shown in the following table.
The bottom line is that financial transactions have been running at close to $300 trillion a year in France for last 3 years. They actually went over $400 trillion in 2013, but $300 trillion a year is still a large number. You can also see that the amounts being churned though the large payment systems like Euroclearn Target, Core and Clearnet France totally dwarf the levels of activity in the credit card system (less than a billion dollars), direct debits, credit transfers and cheques.
It's really annoying that BIS no longer gives the numbers in Euros, but we can assume that $300 trillion is about €261 trillion.
Now, anyone who has read my blog anytime since 2010 knows that I am a big fan of using a Financial Transaction Tax as a very good way to raise revenue. Imagine that Macron's government decided to impose a 0.03% tax on Financial Transactions in France. This would raise nearly €100 billion. Imagine what you could do with that? It's enough to provide an additional Basic Income of around €1600 a year - around €135 a month for every man woman and child in France - on top of the €600 provided by the 30% flat tax.
That's starting to sound like a pretty decent level of income. Enough to allow many "Gilet Jaune" protestors to live decently.
So, how much is President Macron prepared to do to satisfy the French population? Is he prepared to take on the Financial Markets who will no doubt say that a 0.03% tax on transactions will cause the sky to fall in etc.
But the point is, my proposed Financial Transaction Tax would be paid by absolutely everyone in France. Even someone with no other source of revenue would be paying 0.03% in tax when their €600 Basic Income payment arrives. But I suspect that even the poorest of us would be happy to pay 18 centimes in tax every month....
After all, fair's fair....
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