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Abstract Two types of policy have been proposed to eliminate noise trading in the foreign exchange market: increasing the entry cost or imposing a 'Tobin tax' type of transaction tax. In this paper, we endogenize entry decisions of both informed traders and noise traders and show that these policies may be ineffective in reducing exchange rate volatility. This is because these policies will discourage the entry of all traders, so they may not change the relative ratio of traders, or they may affect informed traders disproportionately more, which increases the relative ratio of noise traders and exchange rate volatility.

The article provides a critical analysis of the campaign for a Tobin Tax. A popular view that global civil society can act as an agent for ethics is interrogated by appeal to the dilemmas and political contests which pervade the campaign. Problems with financial and institutional universalism undermine any unambiguous ethical appeal in the Tobin Tax by imposing a set of limits on thinkable avenues of reform. However, and drawing on the philosophical pragmatism of Richard Rorty, it is argued that the campaign can be celebrated for its role in ongoing practices of 'sentimental education'. By illustrating the harm that financial markets cause, the Tobin Tax involves larger, more diverse, audiences in a conversation about global finance; technical and sentimental discourses blur. Moreover, those very contests that pervade the campaign can act to interrupt the totalizing aspects of the proposal, thus making alternatives thinkable. Engaging the 'politics of sentimental education', in this way, allows a contingent celebration of what is ethically useful in the Tobin Tax, while leaving an area of contest that is potentially antithetical. Rather than plump for an either/ or position, the difficult, but ethical, challenge is to do both-and. The article concludes by suggesting how this 'politics of sentimental education' might bear upon existing knowledge about the theory and practice of global civil society.

Acknowledgement of the ethical dimension of global finance is commonplace in the wake of financial crises. The sub-prime crisis and ensuing credit crunch are only the latest in a long run of global financial crises that wreak social havoc and force us to consider alternative possibilities for global finance.

In momenti in cui la finanza sembra non rispondere più alle esigenze di risparmio e di investimento dell'economia reale, si fanno sempre più insistenti le richieste di una tassazione che vada a colpire gli speculatori e aiuti a ristabilire l'equilibrio nei mercati risollevando al contempo le finanze dei paesi. La tesi di laurea specialistica sviluppata si concentra su di un tema di recentissima attualità: la Tobin Tax, ribattezzata in seguito Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), una tassa sulle transazioni finanziarie tanto amata quanto discussa da tutta l'Europa e non solo. Un tema che, benché nato in un contesto storico e culturale diverso da quello attuale, è tornato solo negli ultimi anni a suscitare un notevole interesse tra gli economisti e politici viste le recenti crisi economico-finanziarie dei paesi. In questa tesi è stato affrontato l'iter storico-legislativo della tassa: dalla proposta originaria ideata dall'economista James Tobin, alla proposta europea fino all'attuazione della normativa in Italia.