{"id":185405,"date":"2010-01-15T09:48:48","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T14:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/economics\/2010\/01\/15\/a-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-bank-tax-plan\/"},"modified":"2010-01-15T09:48:48","modified_gmt":"2010-01-15T14:48:48","slug":"a-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-bank-tax-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/185405","title":{"rendered":"A Reason to Be Skeptical of Bank Tax Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u0092s hard to argue against the fairness of President Barack Obama<\/strong>\u0092s proposed tax on banks to recoup the costs of last year\u0092s bailouts. On logical grounds, though, there is a reason to be skeptical.<\/p>\n

Administration officials worry about a credit crunch and want banks to lend more. Banks don\u0092t lend out of thin air — they need liabilities on the other side of their balance sheets to fund new loans. The proposed tax would assess a 0.15% levy on bank liabilities (minus insured deposits.) Taxing bank liabilities after their big bailout might be fair. And as the administration notes, it might be a deterrent to banks against about taking on too much leverage and taking on unwise risks. But it\u0092s not an incentive to lend, something to remember the next time they\u0092re getting bashed for worsening the credit crunch.<\/p>\n

It just shows, there are few easy choices in this post-crisis world, and doing what is right often works at cross purposes with doing what is good.<\/p>\n

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It\u0092s hard to argue against the fairness of President Barack Obama\u0092s proposed tax on banks to recoup the costs of last year\u0092s bailouts. On logical grounds, though, there is a reason to be skeptical. Administration officials worry about a credit crunch and want banks to lend more. Banks don\u0092t lend out of thin air — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}