MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

British PM Brown “Tobin tax” suggestion rebuffed

Brown is not very convincing lately

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suffered an embarrassing rebuff when he floated the prospect of a new tax worldwide, only to have it flatly and publicly rejected by the United States and other major financial players.

Mr Brown raised the possibility of a worldwide levy on financial transactions in a speech to the world's most powerful finance ministers.

The so-called “Tobin Tax”, named after the US economist who invented it, would apply in international financial transactions, but would not apply at the retail level of holidaymakers buying foreign currency.

Mr Brown raised it as one of several possibilities for achieving what he called a “social contract” between the big financial institutions and the public. But US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner flatly rejected the idea, as did Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty.

Mr Geithner told Sky News: “That's not something that we're prepared to support.” He later told a news conference: “This is an idea that has been around for a long time. Many countries have a lot of experience with the design of these kinds of taxes. I think, frankly, the experience has been mixed.”

And Mr Flaherty said: “We are not in the business of raising taxes; we are in the business of lowering taxes in Canada. It is not an idea we would look at.”

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Khan, said he believed a transaction tax was unlikely to be adopted as “transactions” were difficult to measure.

Mr Brown's call came in a speech to finance ministers from the G20 group of countries meeting in St Andrews.

He called for a new global “social contract” with the financial institutions to ensure taxpayers around the world would never again have to bear the cost of banking failure. He said that in future there must be a ”just distribution of risks and rewards.