The big problem with the research around financial transaction tax is that most of the academics working on it are completely clueless - they have no real idea

The big problem with the research around financial transaction tax is that most of the academics working on it are completely clueless - they have no real idea how a lot of the financial world works operationally in practice. For example one of the major papers made a estimate for the total daily volume of the forex trading; it was lower than the volume that a single mid-tier investment bank would do. Most papers also ignore standard practices like deal netting that banks do to reduce organic transaction costs.