The International Monetary Fund is recommending the Group of 20 nations tax financial institutions' non-deposit liabilities and the sum of profit and compensation to help pay for future bailouts of the industry.
The two levies, with those on liabilities taking priority, are part of a preliminary report the G-20 requested last year to review how the financial industry can help pay for government efforts to repair the banking system.
While the IMF will deliver a final report to heads of state and government in June, France and the UK have already backed the idea of a tax on banks.
"Measures that impose new costs on financial institutions will need to reflect and be coordinated with regulatory changes under consideration," according to the report. Policy makers from the G-20 are weighing proposals to have banks shoulder the costs of rescuing the financial industry after governments and central banks provided an estimated $11 trillion to institutions including New York-based Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Heading into this week's meetings in Washington of the IMF, World Bank and G-20 nations, there is growing acceptance of a financial risk levy, a US Treasury official told reporters in Washington yesterday. Debate during the April 23rd talks will focus on winning over skeptics such Canada and deliberating on the details of such a fee, the official said
The liabilities tax should be coupled with a "resolution mechanism" to dismantle a failing firm without disrupting the rest of the financial system, the report said. "International cooperation would be beneficial, particularly in the context of cross-border financial institutions."
The IMF said that the fiscal costs of direct support to the financial system, excluding the amounts recovered so far, have averaged 2.7 per cent of gross domestic product for advanced G-20 economies.
"These are important proposals," British chancellor Alistair Darling said in a statement yesterday. "The recognition that banks should make a contribution to the society in which they operate is right" and "any agreement has to be international", he said.
In some cases, unrecovered costs remain "very high," the IMF said, citing 5.4 per cent of GDP in the UK, 3.6 per cent in the US and 4.8 per cent in Germany. As a result of the crisis, public debt in G-20 advanced economies is projected to rise by almost 40 percentage points of GDP by 2015 from 2008, the institution forecast.
The levy on liabilities, flat at first, could be drawn from experiences of past crises, which suggest that 2 per cent to 4 per cent of GDP would be sufficient, the IMF said. The proceeds could go to a resolution fund or to countries' budgets, and should exclude equity "to reward capital accumulation, and insured liabilities to avoid double imposition"., Other liabilities could be taken out of the taxable amount, such as subordinated debt and government guaranteed debt, it said.
Bloomberg