Basel banking committee chairman says no to bank tax

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FT story in which Basel committee on banking reform chairman Nout Wellink says the bank tax idea must wait until capital and liquidity rules are toughened, something the committee expects to have passed by year's end.

Of the tax idea, Wellink says:  "I doubt whether this is a good idea.  It's born out frustration.  There are strong political motives behind it."

Wellink's committee is the group that passed the landmark Basel II accords on banking in 2004.

China considers US-style property taxes

WSJ story (Fung) on China thinking through what it will eventually take to control the housing market, which is booming along the coast (see chart below) and presumably increasing the coastal-interior divide.

China has real estate taxes now, and is considering jacking them up, says Fung.  But the real rule-set reset would be to shift to US-style annual taxes, which "would mark a significant escalation of its struggle to cool down a booming property market now widely being described as a bubble."

My guess:  it'll take the bubble bursting for China to make this bold move. Developers vehemently oppose the move, and nobody wants to piss them off as construction is a bright spot right now.  Sticking in the new type of taxes now might just prick the bubble.

Still, expect the government to do this eventually (Chongqing's city gov has proposed it to Beijing), with the first targets, according to the piece, being second homes (luxury tax really designed to tamp down on flipping or speculation).  The leadership fears the rising sense of coastal-interior/have-have-not divide, but is adamant about encouraging individual home ownership--a very middle-class-empowering status.

Oh yeah, there will be some new rules in the Gulf of Mexico

Realize I'm behind the curve on this one in terms of latest developments (last week saw me focused on setting up this new site), but I like the map and the WSJ illustration so much that I felt the need to capture.

Plus, whenever there's a crisis like this, I usually clip anything until somebody mentions new rules or regs, which will most definitely result.

If the Times Square bomber was great timing for Obama on Iran and Af-Pak (not to mention the fact that the attack was prevented by those always wily New Yorkers), then the timing here is an absolute bad, given Obama's recent commitment to drilling offshore.  With predictions being that the eventual accumulated spill will overtake Valdez '89, the accident definitely perturbs the system all right.

But no, I don't see a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf.  Mississippi's governor Haley Barbour was quickly trying to kill that notion, as were the smarter Gulf coast senators (Sessions from AL was particularly goofy in this manner, declaring on TV that the US should bankrupt BP if that's what it takes).  The region's just too important to our domestic production.

So we wait and see about those new rules . . ..

Goldman now pays the same for debt as everybody else

FT piece says Goldman now forced to pay roughly same insurance rates as everybody else in the biz, "as the bank's regulatory woes take a toll on investors' confidence and its standing on Wall Street.