Nancy Pelosi is now saying that any financial transaction tax must be internationally agreed on:

Any tax imposed on financial transactions would have to take effect internationally to keep Wall Street jobs and related business from moving overseas, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

“It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule,” Pelosi said at a news conference. “We couldn’t do it alone, we’d have to do it as an international initiative.”

This is wrong on a number of levels:

• There is already such a tax in the UK, and it has been there for years, and London’s “The Street” still rivals Wall Street.
• The US had a tax on stock purchases well into the 1960s, and it did not chase investors over seas.
• The idea that much of the financial industry would go elsewhere is a bad thing is simply misguided. Above a certain proportion of GDP, it becomes a source of parasitic loss, and detracts from our economic well-being.
• If we wait for international consensus, it will never happen.

I’m just saying.