After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, with the emergence of floating exchange rate and inflation, international financial transactions, especially some speculative financial transactions, began to prosper. In this context, some scholars have proposed to levy a transaction tax on foreign exchange transactions and some financial futures and options transactions. Among them, Tobin, an American economist, explicitly proposed to levy additional tax on foreign exchange transactions. Therefore, many people later called it "Tobin tax", and the international financial transaction tax is one of the Tobin taxes.

Now this concept has undergone some evolution. If we refer to the international financial transaction tax, its meaning is not only to tax foreign exchange transactions, but also to tax cross-border and different nationalities.

With the establishment of global floating exchange rate system and the implementation of financial liberalization policies in various countries, large-scale cross-border capital flows have become an important feature of the global financial system. This greatly increases the complexity of macro-risk management in various countries, and has an impact on currency exchange rate system and financial stability. How to deal with international cross-border capital flows has become the most urgent strategic issue.

In order to alleviate the exchange rate fluctuations caused by large-scale capital flows, the late American Nobel laureate in economics james tobin first put forward the term "financial transaction tax" in 1972, suggesting a global unified tax on spot foreign exchange transactions.

France and Germany have always advocated a global financial transaction tax. On August 20 1 16 16, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both proposed to levy a financial transaction tax within the EU. It is expected that the French and German governments will submit the financial transaction tax collection plan to the EU in September this year, and the EU will review it, and submit relevant proposals to the G20 in June+10, 5438.

20 1 1 In June, European Commission President Barroso sent a letter to Van Rompuy, the permanent president of the European Council, saying that the European Commission had completed the financial transaction tax impact assessment and was ready to issue formal legislative proposals in the second half of this year. Analysts believe that the EU may take the lead in introducing a financial transaction tax.

Henri SteDignac, an economist at the French Economic Situation Observation Center, said that the daily net turnover of the global foreign exchange market is about $4 trillion. Taxing financial transactions at a lower tax rate can not only reduce speculative transactions, but also raise some funds.

The proposal of "financial transaction tax" won the support of 1 1 euro zone countries at the meeting of euro zone finance ministers held on October 9, 2012002, which may accelerate this tax proposal that has caused widespread controversy within the EU.