Bank Profits and Bank Taxes in the EU

Download or read book Bank Profits and Bank Taxes in the EU written by Morgan Maneely and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2022, EU banks have been enjoying historically high profits. The profits are mostly driven by the delayed pass-through of the rapid monetary policy tightening to deposit rates and as such are likely transitory. Against this background, almost half of EU countries have introduced new taxes on banks. This paper documents the significant diversity in the design of the new bank taxes—in terms of their tax base, rate, duration, and burden. The paper discusses several trade-offs in the design of bank taxes and argues that an alternative or complementary policy response to temporarily high bank profits is to lock them in as usable bank capital, for example through an increase in countercyclical capital buffer rates.