A tax too far on Hungary’s banks

Discretion, the saying goes, is the better part of valour. The Hungarian government would do well to ponder the meaning of that phrase after a hapless few months in power that has not only seen it single-handedly wreck its own country’s fiscal credibility but also endanger that of much of the rest of emerging Europe. Prime minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won a famous electoral victory earlier this year, securing a two-thirds majority that gives it the right to make sweeping constitutional changes, but its performance on the economic front so far has been infamously gauche.