Nations Seek Tax on Currency Trades to Raise $35 Billion Development Aid

A group of 60 countries called for a tax of 0.005 percent on currency transactions to raise as much as $35 billion a year in development aid.

“We could just do it at the level of the European Union but it would be better to do it globally,” said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner at a press conference in Paris today. “The Americans will be there at the UN to discuss it.”

The group includes most European countries and Japan though not the U.S. or Switzerland. The group’s report will be presented at a Sept. 21 session of the United Nations general assembly.

Debate about such a levy dates to 1971, when U.S. economist James Tobin suggested a tax on currency trading to deter speculation in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegging exchange rates. Tobin, who died in 2002, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work on financial markets.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net.

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