A short history of bank deposit levies

In July 1992 Italy’s Socialist Prime Minister Giuliano Amato imposed a one-off levy on bank accounts. It was a mere 0.6% in comparison with Cyprus’s scheme, and it still left a lasting scar on the country’s financial psyche. In 1936 Norway experimented with a bank deposit tax, but it caused an exodus of cash from the country. There are also some Latin American examples (Brazil in 1992, Argentina at the turn of the millennium) but most were combined with capital controls, and were last-ditch efforts to rescue the financial system when all else had already been tried.

That is from Edmund Conway, here is more.  From Carola Binder, here is a history of capital levies in fiscal crises, and via Google here is what Hungary did in 1920.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed