Britain and Germany in their sights the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) next month to advance the case of a tax for international banking to avoid recourse to public funds if bailout .
A few months after Prime Minister Gordon Brown has launched a whole series of ideas intended to pay for their own rescue banks, Finance Minister Alistair Darling said Tuesday that "there are now more countries that agree on the need for an international tax on systemic banks.
"We must put it out quickly and I urge as meaning the international finance ministers next month in Washington," said Alistair Darling in Parliament.
"I agree with those who say that such a tax must be coordinated at international level to go solo would cost thousands of jobs, not just in London but across the country, has he added.
If the tax credit follows the British model provided the United States or 0.15% annually on total assets, it would raise 3.6 billion pounds (4.0 billion euros) annually, according Reuters estimates.
The conservative opposition, which could win the May elections, said she would put forward its own proposal for a tax credit even if there was no agreement among the Group of Twenty (G20) .
The project of the Ministry of Finance shows that German banks will all contribute to a fund of any rescues in the future, contributions are based on the size and risks to the financial system.
The German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said on Wednesday that such a tax could help to raise one billion euros.
The German government hopes that a proposal be agreed next week at the Council of Ministers in order to convert the bill by the end of the first half.
"The resources collected in this fund will be available to finance future restructuring and divestiture measures for systemic banks," reads the German project."All banks in Germany will be obliged to contribute to this fund.
The document says nothing specific about the duration of levying the tax, but he noted that the Ministry of Finance will monitor continuously the application to see if it is "tolerable".
Legal experts say it's the depositor who ultimately pay the tax."The only real solution to this is to ensure that banks are not subject to this tax can not legally be put into competition in the territory covered, in other words, is protectionism National, "said Simon Gleeson of Clifford Chance.
NOT FOR TOBIN TAX
This idea of a tax that affects the balance sheets of banks began to take hold and is another approach to the problem of "too big to fail", a term designating the banks that have a position such that their bankruptcy would destabilize the financial system, as was the case of investment bank Lehman Brothers.
States want to put in place arrangements so that these banks can not now rely on public money if they find themselves in difficulty.
Finance ministers of the G20 last November asked the International Monetary Fund in April to submit proposals for funding bank bailouts.
The IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said last week that a Tobin tax on financial transactions, that Great Britain and Germany wanted initially, was inapplicable.
Another obstacle to the implementation of such a tax is the opposition of the United States and Canada but it is generally thought that Dominique Strauss-Kahn will propose some sort of tax on bank balance sheets.
Banks do not like.They argue that the tax burden will be a new addition to the fact that they will meet the future capital requirements and tighter liquidity.
The Tobin tax, named after the Nobel Prize in economics James Tobin, was to apply the principle of transaction exchange spot market.