What will happen to high frequency trading when Biden/Harris wins?

Kamala Harris plans to tax financial transactions at 0.2 percent. France did something similar a few years back and their HFT industry is dead. What will happen to firms like Jane Street, Citadel, IMC or Hudson River Trading when Biden/Harris wins and this republic devolves into an anarcho-communist cesspool of cancel culture and leftist fascism?

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Doubt this will actually happen. After all, Biden is the presidential candidate not Harris.

But it's funny that Democrats want to tax the shit out of everything to raise tax revenue for actually important things like education and healthcare when we're literally wasting two digit percentage of income tax revenue on useless things like Social Secuirty and a gigantic government bureaucracy.

I want my tax dollars to fund education and healthcare, not retirement money for bunch of old people whonalrwsdy have money and lazy assholes working at the DMV.

Somebody bring back Bill Clinton.

 

Facts. Social security is ridiculous in terms of percentage of overall budget.

 

We need to focus on Education, Defense, Infrastructure, Healthcare, and a money printer

cut everything else starting with Social Security 

 

If a tax like that actually did get passed, it would be a death sentence for a lot of fast-trading firms. The UK's FTT exempts a lot of traders for being liquidity providers, so a lot of MMs could stay afloat albeit at much smaller levels of success. That said, I'm not personally too worried that the tax is likely if they win. Both parties like to talk a big game before they actually get elected.

As an aside, I'll never understand why Democrats so often push for these kinds of tax increases. Bernie especially talked about how muh Wall Street/HFT is evil and we need a tax to get rid of it but also plans to fund programs based on its existance? Choose one bud-if you take away a business' entire profit margin with your tax, you won't be getting any revenue because they'll shut down.

 

This may be true in the specific instance of High Frequency Trading, but this is also the same argument Wall Street has made when threatened with any kind of reform, oversight, or taxation for the last century and then some.  As a group, Wall Street has often been far more of a Cassandra than the facts warrant, which is why no one is going to take the industry seriously when they insist that a modern day stamp tax is going to sound the death knell for the industry and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

You may be correct that most voters don't have the intellectual capacity to understand nuance in policy discussions, but I would argue that the electorate has a very long collective memory when it comes to feeling hoodwinked by financiers in particular (whether or not they're correct in that feeling depends on the situation, of course).  Especially for the last few decades, it's hard to fault the public for feeling as though Wall Street promotes privatized gain and socialized losses, because that has been the case.  Even if the connection is tenuous, as it is here, it's not hard to understand why incurring general resentment by being completely incapable of policing itself or asking for intelligent oversight and regulation has made it difficult for financial professionals to claim the moral or intellectual high ground, even when they actually occupy it.

 

Heard that competition has basically rationalized the HFT space anyway (good coders basically a commodity today) so excess profits have mostly been sucked away

More curious what this does to the guys who trade in a couple seconds to 2 weeks time horizon (Ren Tech / Jane Street / etc)

 

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