Wall Street isn’t sitting idly by and waiting for voters to decide whether any of the aggressive Wall Street tax proposals being touted by Democrat nominees deserve serious attention,
In a scathing 41-page study that finds that financial transaction taxes hurt investors everywhere they have been introduced, SIFMA, the securities industry’s trade group, is officially fighting back.
SIFMA is distributing the new report– “Ramifications of an FTT: A Financial Transaction Tax Will Harm US Capital Markets & Individual Investors,” to key lawmakers and policy officials.
The report is being disseminated as shaky Democratic presidential front runner Joe Biden, former VP under President Obama, weighs a financial transaction tax on stock and bond transactions similar to those pitched by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
Warren says her wealth tax would raise close to $3 trillion from a few hundred of the richest people in the country, according to her campaign. Sanders’ plan would hit more wealthy people and do so at a higher rate, and his campaign proudly says it would halve
With Biden dipping in the polls as Warren closes in, Biden’s advisors confirmed he too is now considering a plan that could tax financial transactions, like the sale of stocks and bonds.
But FTTs not only fail to hit revenue projections, according to 30 case studies cited in the SIFMA report, the tax would hurt markets and disadvantage individual investors.
In fact, SIFMA argues the FTT transaction levies would increase costs and lower returns fairly dramatically for individual Americans who are responsible for 52.1% of the $34.6 trillion in retirement assets that individually funded through defined contribution pension plans, IRAs and annuities.
Vanguard, one of the largest asset managers for individual investor money, performed an analysis on the negative impact to individual investors from what is being called a small FTT of 0.1%. The results, cited by SIFMA, show:
- Individuals would be forced to work 2.5 years longer before retirement;
- Individuals would experience a $5,989 20-year investment loss to their retirement savings, a 19% decline;
- Individuals would experience a $7,800 shortfall in a college savings account, meaning parents would need to save an extra $250 per annum per child.
“Why increase costs and lower returns for individual investors?” SIFMA asked in the report. “Why increase funding costs for municipalities and the federal government? Or risk the competitive positioning of U.S. capital markets and therefore threaten U.S. economic growth?”
Increased transaction costs would not be limited to individual stock transactions, but would flow through to mutual funds and ETFs and any other financial product to which the FTT applies. As a result, FTTs would also have a significant impact on passive investments like index-based products, which have higher turnovers given redemptions and portfolio rebalances, the study found. Of course, the biggest victims of the FTT would be high-frequency traders.
Since retirement accounts including the Federal Thrift Savings Plan are invested in target date funds, “every time the fund manager rebalances or shifts the asset mix, the tax would be imposed….These costs will be heavily born by pension, asset and fund managers managing individual investor money, i.e. passed on to the individual investor. This is a tax on all investors, not just the wealthy,” SIFMA said.
“Given the increased trade costs, FTTs decrease returns on investment portfolios and retirement accounts,” the study reported. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study FTTs caused negative impacts on returns, including:
- On average, across 14 separate transaction tax changes in AsiaPac markets, a 23% rise in transaction costs caused an immediate 1% decline in daily market returns;
- A 1% tax on equity trades in Sweden resulted in a market decline of 5.3% in the 30 days leading up to the introduction of the tax.
“As shown in this report, FTTs fail to reach objectives on the following accounts: (a) they increase costs and lower returns for individual investors; (b) they typically, and often significantly, miss revenue generation projections, as the taxable base declines with volumes; (c) not only do they not curb volatility but instead increase it as trading volumes decline, harming capital markets; (d) they increase financing costs for municipalities, the federal government and corporations; (e) they increase prices for consumer goods; and (f) they generally damage economic growth by decreasing revenues and jobs in the U.S. as volumes migrate,” SIFMA asserted.
