Abstract
Chapter 6 sums up the financial problems and imbalances described in the book and offers solutions to casino finance. The main focus is on reviving democracy and prioritizing the needs of society over those of the financial sector. Instead of dominating the economy as is the case today, finance should serve it. What is essentially at stake is the inalienable right of present and future generations to live in a decent and dignified manner in an accountable and civilised society.
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Notes
- 1.
Fejtő, François, Requiem pour un empire défunt, Paris, Lieu Commun, 1988, p. 30.
- 2.
Ibid., pp. 35 and 36 or the special issue of the satirical magazine Crapouillot on World War One, 1935.
- 3.
General De Gaulle wanted, in his own words, “to put right one hundred and fifty-nine years of History”, i.e. to place a kind of king at the head of France, and make up for the death of Louis XVI in 1793.
- 4.
The following book is an interesting reference as regards banks’ equity: Admati, Anat and Hellwig, Martin, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Princeton University Press, USA, 2013.
- 5.
Basel III Accords: the Basel III accords, published by the Basel committee (hosted by the Bank for International Settlements) in December 2010 and revised in June 2011, seek to regulate the banking sector in order to stabilise the financial system. These attempts, however, remain timid and under the control of financial lobbies.
- 6.
See: “LuxLeaks 2: le parlement européen prêt à enquêter, mais pas trop”, Ludovic Lamant and Dan Israel, Mediapart, 10 December 2014.
- 7.
Likewise, the Dutch Jeroen Dijsselbloem, former President of Eurogroup and former finance Minister of a country which allows, thanks to a lax tax legislation, companies, such as the Canadian Eldorado, to evade taxation in the country in which it was located: namely Greece. The losses would be at least €1.7 million. See: Comment la Grèce voit ses impôts s’évaporer via l’Europe, Dan Israel, Mediapart, 31 March 2014.
- 8.
See: Juncker refuse de rendre publiques les données sur les sociétés-écrans, Dan Israel, Mediapart, 12 December 2014.
- 9.
See the article entitled: Optimisation fiscale: EDF indirectement mis en garde par le gouvernement, Le Monde.fr, 10 September 2014.
- 10.
In 1913, it only had 400 pages. This complexity generates huge costs for the American taxpayer; 6.1 billion hours each year is spent trying to understand the pertinent passages of this code and to complete the tax return, which corresponds to a total cost of close to $234 billion. Cf. Federal Tax Laws and Regulations Are Now Over 10 Million Words Long, Scott Greenberg, 8 October 2015, Tax Foundation.
- 11.
As far as I know, this idea was initially introduced in the 1970s by René Montgranier, who presented it as “the egg of Columbus”. See his book entitled: La Clé de la crise, Éditions économiques financières et sociales, 1985, pp. 108–120, as well as the article: Pour une taxe sur tous les mouvements de fonds, Multitudes 3/2011. In the 1990s, Professor Edgar Feige, from the University of Wisconsin, then subsequently Simon Thorpe, director of research at CNRS at Toulouse, as well as Bernard Dupont in Genève, developed a similar idea. Felix Bolliger, in his article “Reinvent the System – Microsteuer auf Gesamtzahlungsverkehr”, 2013, also worked on this concept.
- 12.
See annexe 2 of the monthly bulletin of economic statistics of the National Swiss Bank (BNS) of April 2013 “Trafic des paiements dans le Swiss Interbank Clearing SIC”, cited by Bolliger, Felix. The calculation method used by BNS was altered between January and April 2013, and payment traffic for 2012 therefore dropped from close to CHF95,000 billion to approximately CHF30,000 billion (and reached CHF43,000 billion in 2017). Transfers between the current accounts of banks to BNS and their financial trading accounts in the SIC system are from then on excluded from the data. Despite this statistical reduction, financial transfers continue to be extremely high because the SIC system only records a part of the transactions. One has to consider those that on foreign exchange markets (FOREX) concern the franc that add an amount of close to CHF50,000 billion a year, treated either over-the-counter or on the EBS platform. One also has to consider transfers made inside each financial establishment, operations on derivatives and check that the high-frequency transactions have been taken into account… An estimate of CHF100,000 billion for the total number of transactions appears to be fairly conservative.
- 13.
See: Un économiste veut remplacer tous les impôts par une seule taxe, Julien Marion, BFM, 30 October 2016.
- 14.
To this regard, see the statements made by Gerry Rice, IMF spokesperson in Washington, on 31 January 2013. According to Rice, “The financial sector is undertaxed and must pay an equitable part in order to attenuate the costs of the current crisis…”.
- 15.
Stamp duty.
- 16.
The extension of this tax to intra-day trading was also planned.
- 17.
This means a quarter of the French GDP which in 2015 represented €2.181 billion.
- 18.
La Capture, La Découverte, 2014.
- 19.
See the article: Taxe Tobin: les banques font leur marché chez les hauts fonctionnaires, Ludovic Lamant, Mediapart, 9 December 2014.
- 20.
See the publications on this topic of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM).
- 21.
Even if it were a single Deutsche Mark, published by Livanis publishers in Athens in 2012.
- 22.
The Jewish community of Thessaloniki was almost totally exterminated by the Nazis: close to 54,000 people from a total of 56,000 were killed.
Bibliography
Admati, Anat, and Hellwig, Martin, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Princeton University Press, USA, 2013.
Chavagneux, Christian, and Philipponnat, Thierry, La Capture, La Découverte, 2014.
Fejtő, François, Requiem pour un empire défunt, Lieu Commun, Paris, 1988.
Glezos, Manolis, Even If It Were a Single Deutsche Mark, Livanis publishers, Athens, 2012.
Greenberg, Scott, Federal Tax Laws and Regulations Are Now Over 10 Million Words Long, Tax Foundation, 8 October 2015.
Montgranier, René, La Clé de la crise, Éditions économiques financières et sociales, 1985.
Monthly Bulletin of Economic Statistics of the National Swiss Bank (BNS), “Trafic des paiements dans le Swiss Interbank Clearing SIC”, April 2013.
Tolstoy, Leo, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.
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Chesney, M. (2018). Some Remedies and Solutions. In: A Permanent Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00518-4_6
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