{"id":245697,"date":"2010-01-29T08:02:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T13:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/felix-salmon\/2010\/01\/29\/dont-exclude-treasuries-from-the-bank-tax\/"},"modified":"2010-01-29T08:02:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T13:02:47","slug":"don%e2%80%99t-exclude-treasuries-from-the-bank-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/245697","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t exclude Treasuries from the bank tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a fan of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSTRE60S00820100129\">excluding Treasuries<\/a> from the proposed new bank tax. For one thing, Treasuries are assets, not liabilities: they&#8217;re technically not covered by the tax in the first place. What&#8217;s really being talked about here is the repo market, which has grown far too big, and which has made it far too easy for banks to borrow money at ultra-short maturities.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s true that if the repo market shrank dramatically, that might conceivably reduce demand for Treasuries so much that, as JP Morgan has suggested in a research note, the revenue from the fee could be completely offset by the Treasury&#8217;s increased costs of borrowing. On the other hand, estimates of the effects of reduced demand on Treasury prices are notoriously unreliable.<\/p>\n<p>Against that is the fact that shrinking the repo market is probably the easiest and most painless mechanism that we have for shrinking the banks &#8212; and we want to shrink the banks. In that sense, the deleterious effect of the new fee on the repo market should probably be considered a feature rather than a bug. Let&#8217;s keep it in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a fan of excluding Treasuries from the proposed new bank tax. For one thing, Treasuries are assets, not liabilities: they&#8217;re technically not covered by the tax in the first place. What&#8217;s really being talked about here is the repo market, which has grown far too big, and which has made it far too [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":398,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245697","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\/398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}