A Tobin tax? The outré is back in. Christine Lagarde, France's guru of the free market, could never have imagined that she might find herself seated over fruit salad and tea on the Left Bank of the Seine, selling the merits of a scheme to rein in the forces of global capital and channel vast sums from the banks into the hands of the people.
But in the nearly three years since President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed her to bring U.S. -style market discipline to the creaky French economy, the world has turned upside down and radical economic ideas are no longer so outré. "I am, economically speaking, a liberally minded person - I'm not a state interventionist, if you take my point," the French Finance Minister tells me quietly, almost by way of apology. Even a year ago, the Tobin tax - named after its inventor, economist James Tobin - was an idea from the fringes of political thought, the sort of thing that odd-looking people who corner you at parties talk about at length. An Introduction to Capital Structure - Why Capital Structure Mat.