Forums: Transaction Cost

Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her strongest endorsement yet of a global financial transaction fee Thursday after raising the issue directly with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in a conversation this week. Geithner was widely seen as opposing such a levy when it was proposed by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, at a meeting of G-20 finance ministers last month in Scotland. But after their phone conversation Wednesday, Pelosi told colleagues that the secretary indicated he was more open to some such fee than had been reported. Pelosi didn’t reveal her conversation with Geithner at her weekly press conference Thursday, but...

The M&A market is found relevant in lots of countries including Russia. The other day the informational agency Bloomberg published its traditional annual market research across the globe. A bit earlier, in the middle of November, the third annual national forum Mergers and Acquisitions of Russia took place. The research results determined the rating of the most civilized transactions at the M&A market. Western M&A markets got used to mergers prevailing over acquisitions, but as for the Russian part, here acquisitions form the major share of dealings. No wonder that record high rates of transactions’ number ($3.1tr in the world...

President Bush approved a deal to allow a company from Dubai, the country that was forced to withdraw from the Portgate deal, to take over American plants that make parts for jets and tanks for the United States. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a country that continues to pay money to the families of homicide bombers and to the Hamas terrorist group. It appears to have been protecting Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s for some period of time. America was unable to bomb Osama's hideout because he was meeting with officials of the government of...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2006 – A United Arab Emirates-owned firm that's slated to take over shipping terminal operations at six major U.S. ports requested an extended U.S. government review of the transaction, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States announced in a news release yesterday. The committee "welcomed the announcement by Dubai Ports World that it will submit for review its proposed acquisition of control of U.S. port terminal operations," the release stated. Headed by the U.S. Treasury Department, CFIUS inspects sales of firms that could affect national security. The review, which the White House accepted, will include...

AUTOMATED PAYMENT TRANSACTION (APT) TAX Taxation technology for the 21st century Dr. Edgar L. Feige, Professor Emeritus of Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the originator of the APT Tax concept, has just produced new estimates suggesting that a broad-based transaction tax as low as six tenths of one percent could replace the entire Federal and State 2005 budget revenue requirements of the United States of America. The APT concept is elegant in its simplicity - potentially replacing the entire federal and state tax system - including income, corporate profits, excise and estate taxes - in favor of a...