This is NOT satire

From the Evening Standard:

London bankers today expressed dismay at Chancellor George Osborne's hike in the bank levy in yesterday's autumn statement for the third time this year. It has once again raised fears that UK banks could move their headquarters overseas and foreign banks scale back their operations in this country.

Osborne raised the rate from 0.078% to 0.088% after admitting the tax would fail to raise the £2.5billion he had targeted for this year. The levy was originally introduced to replace Labour's bankers' bonus tax and was [increased] both in February and March.

Stuart Fraser, head of policy at the Corporation of London, expressed his fury by saying: "A stable tax regime is essential to ensure our international competitiveness is not damaged."

The bank levy will be charged as a percentage of banks' assets on December 31. As banks have shrunk their loan books in response to both the eurozone crisis and tougher regulation the Treasury has realised that its planned take has shrunk. Figures revealed in the autumn statement show the expected income from the levy for this year is now only £2.1 billion but that it will rise to £2.9 billion in 2016.

Hey ho.

1. The banks were barely affected by VAT hike earlier this year, which has clobbered most productive businesses by around £10 billion a year.

2. The banks have been bailed out time and again to the tune of hundreds of billion of pounds.

3. The banks will benefit from the planned reductions in the mainstream rate of corporation tax from 28% in FY 2010 to 26% this year (with further reductions in the pipeline).

4. The banks will benefit in particular from new rules which exempt overseas branch profits from UK corporation tax. In isolation, this is a very good rule, because dividends from overseas subsidiaries are by and large exempt, but extending this to overseas branches benefits banks in particular because they tend to structure their international operations as branches rather than subsidiaries, heck knows why.

5. It seems unlikely that the stupid Tobin Tax will go ahead.

6. It's not as if banks are struggling, as their senior staff can still afford to pay themselves annual bonuses of £10 billion-off a year. Sure, 50% income tax and 13.8% NIC gets deducted, but the banks must have had the money in the first place.

And they're whining about the bank asset tax rate being hiked by 0.01% of their assets?

Banks can earn a 2% margin on their assets in their sleep, it's like rental income, so 0.088% of that 2% is like a 4.4% tax on their unearned monopoly rental income. That'll be promptly hiked to 2% of the higher of [their UK assets] and their [UK deposits], or 100% of their UK-source rental income, when I'm in charge as a quid pro quo for scrapping corporation tax, PAYE and so on. Clearly, it is daft to tax banks with UK headquarters on their overseas assets, Osborne doesn't seem to grasp that bit.