Italy approves 40% windfall tax on banks for 2023 as profits soar • Hacker News Board

Re: Italy approves 40% windfall tax on banks for 2023 as profits soar

#191

Post by ABCLAW » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

zmnd wrote: post #61

tensor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the old American disease of not ensuring competition and instead passing regulation ensuring monopolies stay in power means the "problem" is not actual solved, and is in fact made worse.

> The US is home to over 4,700 FDIC-insured banks. It’s not far off from the EU, which has 5,171, but stop and consider that the EU consists of 27 countries. The UK currently has 365 banks, and Canada has 83

The number of banks is not a good indicator of how much competition exists in a market. The elasticity of prices in that market is a better measure, but also has flaws. In general you need to look at how much margin a given industry is pulling in to determine how much leverage it has.

On the bank metric: There are plenty of quasi non functional FDIC insured banks that are used as vehicles for reverse takeovers to allow a market entrant to avoid the hassle of obtaining their licenses.

Additionally given the substantially increased variability within different European markets we'd expect significantly different competitive dimensions between regional and international tier banks.

Re: Italy approves 40% windfall tax on banks for 2023 as profits soar

#192

Post by ABCLAW » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #185

madballster wrote: post #21

This is an old European disease. Corporate profits are often seen as an adverse result; of consumers being taken advantage of unfairly. Taxing excess profits beyond what are already high tax rates is popular amongst voters (e.g. see poll results in the UK, 2022). However, this lowers the appeal for new entrants to enter these markets to compete for these excess profits through better and more efficient products and s…

> However, this lowers the appeal for new entrants to enter these markets to compete for these excess profits through better and more efficient products and services. And how many de novo banks have there actually been in any country recently? In the US, the land of plenty (banks), there's been one in the last twenty years. Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast just had an episode on this (including the topic of de novo ): *…

Retail banking is low margin high volume, but a bank's CMG or IB divisions are NOT low margin operations. Trading desk margins vary depending on the strength of the group and the clientele. If you're a primary desk for a trillion dollar AUM entity, you make a very pretty penny off your Bloomberg terminal subscription.

Re: Italy approves 40% windfall tax on banks for 2023 as profits soar

#193

Post by wsgeorge » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

bilekas wrote: post #85

webdood90 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think it was possible but banking shills apparently exist > If one wants free enterprise and reap its benefits who wants this from banking??? > one has to allow high profits for companies and see if competition takes care of the "problem" ah, yes - we've seen this work so many times before!

It's seems people have forgotten what the banks did in 2007 and before. It's wild to imagine complaining about them being taxed but few complained about bails out from tax payers.

> but few complained about bails out from tax payers.

I'm sure there were a lot of complaints...