Ik heb de indruk dat het verhaal van KPMG is gebaseerd op Canadees onderzoek uit 1996 (M.G. Wrobel). Over de FTT in Zweden, een veel aangehaald voorbeeld van de negatieve effecten van zo'n FTT, schrijft mevrouw Wrobel (leest en huivert...):
Sweden: In January 1984, Sweden introduced a 50-basis-point tax on the purchase or sale of an equity security. Thus a round trip (purchase and sale) transaction resulted in a 100-basis-point tax. The tax applied to all trades in Sweden using local brokerage services and to stock options. It did not apply to gifts or bequests. In July 1986 the rate was doubled. The next year, a tax at half the normal rate was also applied against trades between dealers. In January 1989, a tax on fixed-income securities was introduced.
The tax on fixed-income securities was considerably less than on equities, as low as 0.2 basis points for a security with a maturity of 90 days or less. On a bond with a maturity of five years or more, the tax was three basis points.
On 15 April 1990, the tax on fixed-income securities was abolished. In January 1991 the rates on the remaining taxes were cut in half and by the end of the year they were abolished completely.
There were several reasons for this change in policy. In the first place, the political climate in Sweden had shifted. The taxes were initially supported because financial transactions were viewed as destabilizing to the economy and as promoting excessive wage differentials. This latter point was distasteful in a society that places so much importance on income equality. The revenues from taxes were disappointing; for example, revenues from the tax on fixed-income securities were initially expected to amount to 1,500 million Swedish kroner per year. They did not amount to more than 80 million Swedish kroner in any year and the average was closer to 50 million.(5)
As taxable trading volumes fell, so did revenues from capital gains taxes, almost entirely offsetting revenues from the equity transactions tax that had grown to 4,000 million Swedish kroner by 1988.(6) (This point is lost entirely in data such as those in Table 1 on page 2, where only direct tax revenues are included.) Another reason for the reduction in capital gains taxes was the decline in share prices associated with the initial announcement of the tax and its increase. On the day that the tax was announced, share prices fell by 2.2%. But there was leakage of information prior to the announcement, which might explain the 5.35% price decline in the 30 days prior to the announcement. When the tax was doubled, prices again fell by another 1%. These declines were in line with the capitalized value of future tax payments resulting from expected trades. It was further felt that the taxes on fixed-income securities only served to increase the cost of government borrowing, providing another argument against the tax.
The Swedish system of taxes also played a very profound role in causing trades to migrate to non-taxed or lower-taxed jurisdictions. With the 1986 announcement that the equity tax would double, 60% of the trading volume of the 11 most actively traded Swedish share classes, accounting for one-half of all Swedish equity trading, moved to London; thus 30% of all Swedish equity trading moved offshore. By 1990, more than 50% of all Swedish trading had moved to London.(7) Foreign investors reacted to the tax by moving their trading offshore while domestic investors reacted by reducing the number of their equity trades.
Even though the tax on fixed-income securities was much lower than that on equities, the impact on market trading was much more dramatic. During the first week of the tax, the volume of bond trading fell by 85%, even though the tax rate on five-year bonds was only three basis points. The volume of futures trading fell by 98% and the options trading market disappeared. Trading in money market securities, which faced a tax as low as 0.2 basis points, fell by 20%. This reaction was due in large part to the existence of a wide variety of non-taxed substitutes. Once the taxes were eliminated, trading volumes returned and grew substantially in the 1990s.
The Swedish results cited above are all consistent with those that economic theory would predict. Events and factors other than the FTT could, however, cause similar results, making it difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships. The timing and magnitude of the financial market effects lead one to look for dramatic changes in explanatory variables. No such changes were evident in economic or financial variables; however, they were evident in changing institutional (i.e., FTT) variables.
This does not mean that high FTT rates are needed to generate such results. The high rates simply make the cause-and-effect relationship clear. Low rates would likely produce similar qualitative results, albeit of smaller magnitudes, but they might be masked by other factors.