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"If the nine economists on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee can never agree, it should be harder than herding cats to round up a thousand practitioners of the dismal science and get them all saying the same thing.
But 1,000 eminent number-crunchers from more than 50 countries have written to G20 finance ministers, urging them to slap a tax on City speculators to help the world's poor.
They may not have spotted the credit crunch coming, but academic economists from top universities including Harvard, Cambridge, Kyoto and the Sorbonne now agree that bankers should pay the price.
In a letter addressed to policymakers from the G20 countries, the economists urge them to impose a "Robin Hood tax", which would emulate the English folk hero by robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
Signatories include Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University who is an influential adviser to Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations; Dani Rodrik, from Harvard, and Ha-Joon Chang, from Cambridge. Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have also backed the letter."
"If the nine economists on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee can never agree, it should be harder than herding cats to round up a thousand practitioners of the dismal science and get them all saying the same thing.
But 1,000 eminent number-crunchers from more than 50 countries have written to G20 finance ministers, urging them to slap a tax on City speculators to help the world's poor.
They may not have spotted the credit crunch coming, but academic economists from top universities including Harvard, Cambridge, Kyoto and the Sorbonne now agree that bankers should pay the price.
In a letter addressed to policymakers from the G20 countries, the economists urge them to impose a "Robin Hood tax", which would emulate the English folk hero by robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
Signatories include Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University who is an influential adviser to Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations; Dani Rodrik, from Harvard, and Ha-Joon Chang, from Cambridge. Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have also backed the letter."
