US President George W. Bush announced on Saturday he would host the first in a proposed series of global summits on the financial crisis as the world grapples with the biggest economic debacle since the Great Depression.
“It is essential that we work together because we are in this crisis together,” Bush said before a meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
A joint statement after the meeting said the first summit would take place in the US soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election and focus on the “principles of reform” needed to fix the world’s financial system.
“Later summits would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles,” the statement said, adding that other world leaders would be contacted beginning this week.
The US and European leaders decided it would be too ambitious to handle all the issues in one summit, White House Spokesman Tony Fratto said.
Sarkozy has called for a revamp of the international financial architecture established after World War II at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference — a massive overhaul that may not win unqualified support in the Bush administration.
The summit plan emerged as fears of a full-blown global recession gathered.
Both US consumer confidence and home construction showed sharp drops and stock markets around the world remain volatile as investors count their losses.
Despite the uncertainty, European shares ended higher on Friday. The US Dow Jones Industrial average ended 127 points down on Friday, but was still up 4.75 percent on the week.
Sarkozy, whose country now holds the rotating presidency of the EU, said the summit would provide an opportunity to reassess the entire global financial system.
“It would be wrong to challenge the foundations of market economics. But we cannot continue along the same lines because the same problems will trigger the same disasters,” he said on Saturday.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon offered to host an emergency expanded G8 summit at the UN headquarters to discuss the crisis.
Ban backed Sarkozy’s appeal for a summit by December.
Ban and Sarkozy met in Quebec City on the sidelines of a summit of French-speaking nations. Sarkozy cut short his stay at the Francophone meeting to meet Bush.
“I strongly believe that holding the summit at the United Nations, the symbol of multilateralism, will lend universal legitimacy to this endeavor and demonstrate a collective will to face this serious global challenge,” Ban said.
Sarkozy said on Friday that the world’s financial system needed to be better supervised.
“Together we need to rebuild a capitalism that is more respectful to man, more respectful to the planet, more respectful to future generations and be finished with a capitalism obsessed by the frantic search for short-term profit,” Sarkozy told the Organisation International de la Francophonie.
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