056 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast

Transcript   CME and DB1 disappoint while the rest of the parish is demonstrating  sound if not outright excellent results. My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business weekly digest. It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast. Financial transaction tax worries are back, over in the EU, in the wake of the recent collapse and the case against Ireland and Apple. That's a case predicated on Ireland at levying, a rate of tax, which Apple paid, but which the EU deemed unfairly low...that festering 30 year battle at the heart of the European union, between the bankrupt and increasingly socialist Franco German Alliance at the heart of the EU’s apparatus led to the Apple case, which when lost, probably killed the concept of a digital tax. At the same time that has led to the notion of a Financial Transaction Tax already deeply divisive in the EU and being discussed for years on end now with no definitive agreement whatsoever... that FTT proposal re-emerging as one of many possible means to plug the many holes in the budgets of the  high spending regimes, aided and abetted by the spendthrift Brussels machine itself. Meanwhile across the Atlantic things don't look much better. At least on the Eastern seaboard, New York and New Jersey are considering financial transaction taxes.New Jersey’s A4402 would impose a 0.25 cent tax on every financial transaction processed in the state in New York. Some law lawmakers have proposed a rate as high as 5 cents per share. That's 1.25 cents, on the other hand for stocks worth less than $5. If either state succeeded, it would represent the only financial transaction tax in the United States of America. Although New York had its own FTT from 1905 to 1981, there is no federal level FTT in the USA. Although fees are imposed to fund the regulatory activities of the Securities Exchange Commission on cash equities. I presume exchangers are going to be poring over data center capacity and choose suitably tax coherent, state regimes. It's another nail in the coffin methinks of New York city whose Tri Tristate area is already deeply unattractive to higher tax payers who've been moving either West to lower tax States or indeed South to Florida.  Over in Europe, the notion of an EU FTT might even be a motivating factor for the UK to move towards more free trade and an abolition of stamp duty, albeit with the current policy state of British government finances, who knows? However, in a more encouraging regulatory note in the past week, finally, we have confirmation of a sensible rollback from the ridiculous era of Genslarian overreach, as the CFTC has voted to scale back oversight, cross border swaps trading. Meanwhile, Stacey Cunningham, the NYSE president was being interviewed by CNBC this week. She noted that individual investors have been, and I quote “a big part of the market over the last few months.” Nowhere has that been more obvious outside of the USA though, than China, which despite not having a Robin hood or other movement... In the course of the first six months of this year, China added a total of 1.55 million investors seeking to trade stocks on the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses. That's up 46.72% year on year in terms of total number of account openings.  Of course. NYSE president Stacy Cunningham's comments come after e-brokers TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers amongst others reported record trading volumes from retail during the second quarter.