UK PM's call for transactions tax gets the cold shoulder

Brown said Saturday such a levy, often called the Tobin Tax after the U.S. economist who devised it, would force financial institutions to be more responsible and was one of a range of measures that could help curb risky behavior.

It has always been thought that Britain opposed the idea, because of fears it could damage the interests of the City of London, Europe's foremost financial center.

But finance minister Alistair Darling said “times change” after 12 months in which G-20 governments had been forced to inject billions of dollars to rescue banks from collapse.

A levy, Darling said, was one way that banks could contribute to the “wellbeing of the world” — and, more pertinently, provide funds to use if they needed bailing out again.

But just hours after Brown gave the Tobin Tax idea fresh impetus in the Scottish town of St. Andrews, where the two-day G-20 finance ministers meeting wrapped up on Saturday, the United States appeared to shoot it down in flames.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said his country had not changed its long-held opposition to an idea first floated in the 1970s.

“No, that's not something that we're prepared to support,” he told Sky News television on Saturday.

Later, Geithner told the end-of-meeting news conference that “it is fair to say that we agree that we have to build a system in which taxpayers are not exposed to risk of loss in the future”.

But while he refused this time to say if Washington would actively oppose a levy on global financial transactions, his assertion that it was “an idea that has been around a long time” spoke volumes.

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