Originally posted by Albert Speer
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In fact, under all the simplifying assumptions I gave, it does so exactly proportionately.
Now, this by itself is not terrible (it doesn't affect the market price of risk to first order!)
It is NOT a subsidy to risk. And because of the asymmetric treatment of gains and losses in real life, it actually taxes risk significantly.
EDIT: by "taxes risk significantly" I mean "reduces incentive to take risk". Under full symmetry between gains and losses, in addition to the tax on rfr, such a tax also reduces the incentive to perform careful research on investments (assuming that individuals are liquidity-constrained which is generally true for at least some people). This is, by itself a net loss (it's like a tax on studying an investment; your time returns less than otherwise).
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