Friday 19 February 2010

Tax rate trading

iPredict launched contracts half an hour ago on the top marginal tax rate. There's been lots of talk of drops in the top marginal rate funded by increased taxes on investment property and an increased GST. Odds on favourite now is a drop in the top marginal rate from 38% to the 33-35% range: it jumped on opening from about $0.50 to $0.88.

At these prices, I'm buying $0.35-$0.38. Wouldn't be a bad little hedge if I weren't heavily liquidity constrained.

As for the hoped for drop to 30 cents? Pretty unlikely.

Matt's launching another 25-odd contracts today....

4 comments:

  1. Eric

    It seems like John Key is turning out to be NZs George Bush - ramping up the drug war, not carrying out any liberty-based reforms that he was elected for, and squandering the right's credibility on economic issues.

    Am i right?

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  2. I'm not sure that Key has made the war on drugs worse than it was; he hasn't made it better, but I'm not sure he's made it worse. I'm not even sure he was elected for any liberty-based reforms. What specific liberty-based reform did he ever promise? He promised a vague sense that nanny state interventionism would stop but did not actually promise to roll back a whit of it.

    On spending, most of the increase in spending has been just following through with stuff Labour put in place prior to the election - working for families and such.

    Totally agree that it's been disappointing, but we should never have had our expectations all that high.

    On the plus side, the three strikes rule looks sensibly set up, he's not reversed the better things Labour put in place (prostitution law reform) and his instincts seem at least a status quo bias rather than a making things worse bias.

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  3. You're right, shouldn't have had better expectations. However, just like George Bush was deemed the "laissez-faire, deregulator-in-chief" here in the US, so will John Key be labelled as such, when the next Labor govt returns, thereby justifying big Govt expansions.

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  4. I wouldn't bet against you on that one.

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