Hungary has dialed down the level of tension with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union by scrapping plans to tax the financial transactions carried out by the country’s central bank. Other commercial banks will still be forced to pay taxes on their financial transactions, but the IMF will be relieved to see a concession from the government in Budapest. There were fears that the tax was intended as a method of exerting control over the Central Bank. The Hungarian forint rallied 1 percent on the news.
