Word: wouldn
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...looming over the FHA, though, is this: At what point does a federal housing agency start to pull back and force private players to resume responsibility for the loans they make? The FHA was founded in 1934 as a way to extend the prospect of homeownership to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. The agency's low down-payment requirement - itself the subject of some controversy - is designed to help deserving if underqualified people get a foothold in property ownership. The FHA was never meant to be the primary way America finances its home-buying...
...obstacles to its implementation. First, there are the tax's tricky practicalities: Which financial transactions and institutions do you target? And who pays, administers and regulates it? But possibly more importantly, every major financial center would need to be on board for the levy to be effective. Investment banks wouldn't likely leave Britain for cheaper foreign currency-trading in Macedonia, but they might well if that opportunity was in Manhattan. Advanced economies imposing the tax unilaterally "would see their financial markets decimated," Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners in London, wrote in a note to clients on Monday...
...those looking to such a tax to protect against future calamities, there's even more disappointment. Squeezing the volume of financial trading wouldn't have done much to tackle the eye-watering debts and shoddy risk assessment at the oversize banks that got us into the current pickle. That job falls to regulators. Moreover, evidence of the impact of transaction charges on the volatility of assets is mixed: buyers in Britain's housing market - which, like many others around the world, cratered in 2007 - have been required to pay a transaction tax on their purchases for years. (Read...
...myself, I'll only buy something if it's worth at least $50 to me. But if you buy something for me, and you spend $50, since you don't know what I like, and you don't know what I have, you may buy something I wouldn't pay anything for. And so you could turn the real resources required to make things into something of no value to me. And that would destroy value...
...time any official in Beijing muses publicly about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans became a bit more like the Chinese - if they saved more and spent less, consistently over time - they wouldn't have to worry about all that...