At the moment, I think it has been calculated that about $3 trillion a day gets traded in currencies, with very little of that, really, of any benefit in terms of any economy.
Tobin was an economist—I think he has died, actually—who put forward the proposal that if you raised 0.1% tax on every transaction, you would have a huge sum of money that could go to some kind of United Nations committee or some international effort to improve the lot of the people of the world. The difficulty, of course, is how do you deal with that?
Well, it seems to me that a couple of people recently—James Galbraith in the States, and Susan George in Europe—have started reviving the concept that Keynes brought forward in his submissions to the original Bretton Woods foundation for an international clearing house. All funds would then clear through that. His proposal included a way of balancing accounts between countries so that no country would have a huge surplus and no country would have a huge deficit, because they would cease to have the direct benefit of those, and other countries would have the benefit of a more moderate trading system.
There are some changes that would need to be made, presumably, in the original Keynes proposal, but it seems to me that unless we get a grip on international finance, we're not going to move forward, because with the amount of money that corporations can make out of moving goods around, pricing them so that they don't have to pay the taxes and can make a paper profit or loss for whichever country they want to look at their accounts, the result, of course, is that they're not contributing fully to the community in which they presumably started.