Sir, Regarding ‘Barroso drops financial taxes from draft G20 wish-list‘: It is shocking to see the European Commission backtracking from pushing for financial taxes to be on the agenda at the forthcoming G20 summit in Seoul in November. A global bank tax to help poor people survive the economic and climate crisis must be urgently [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Hedge funds face uncertain future after EU votes‘: Since the start of the financial crisis in 2007 and the subsequent meltdown, it has become clear that banks (under the Fed’s regulations), investment banks and hedge funds have been investing in the demise during the ensuing financial meltdown (e.g. Bear Stearns). During the GATT/WTO/Clinton/Rubinomics [...]

Sir, While the attention of Europe and the world media remains concentrated on Greece and the other ‘PIGS’, the financial irresponsibility of other states in the euro zone appears to be being happily ignored by the European Central Bank and encouraged by the institutions of the European Union. This is happening despite the fact that [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘EU: Bank levy could raise up to 50 billion a year‘: The European Commission is telling us that governments should raise taxes from the financial sector, not only to pay back the banks’ bailouts and combat climate change, but also to fight poverty in the developing world. I am disappointed that your article [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Commission to fight VAT fraud schemes‘: The principle that you can reclaim money when you fill in a tax report is the real cause of the fraudulent situation. It should be replaced with a simple tax on turnover, with no claiming back. Olle Ekengren Private citizen

Sir, Regarding ‘EU, US re-assess SWIFT data-sharing deal‘: The statements made by the spokespersons of SWIFT are very worrying. They originally said that servers have been moved to Switzerland and the Netherlands, but now admit that there are still servers in the US which hold EU banking data. Could it be that SWIFT has simply [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘EU direct debit rules open to fraud, says consumer group‘: The European Payments Council (EPC) would like to make a few clarifications regarding direct debits schemes in the Single European Payments Area (SEPA). Firstly, the SEPA Direct Debit Schemes developed by the European Payments Council (EPC) in close dialogue with customer representatives do [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Parliament gears up for fight on financial regulation‘: I’m writing to state the case against any US bill that includes a financial transaction tax. Two bills in particular have proposed this tax as a way to pay for job recovery programmes: ‘Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘EU plans to review mortgage access rules‘: A 40% cap on loan-to-value (LTV) to obtain a mortgage, as mentioned in the article, would be a vast overreaction when one thinks of the millions of successful borrowers and mortgage products as compared with the far smaller number of bad debts and repossessions. As the [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Lawmaker: ‘Financial regulation must be tailored’‘: There is so much speculation on how best to proceed in regulating the financial sector it is hard to know where to begin. However, it appears to me that the main criterion is not one of regulation but one of consumer confidence. To this end, what the [...]