At a conference in Chile ahead of a key G20 summit in London this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for global unity and reform of the IMF to face the fallout of the economic crisis.
Brown will host world leaders from the G20 industrialized and developing economies for a crucial summit aimed at coordinating global efforts to fight the economic downturn and preventing similar crises.
“We cannot solve the problem of global financial instability without there being a global solution,” Brown told center-left leaders and policy makers at a two-day conference in the Chilean resort town of Vina del Mar, due to end yesterday.
“We must reform the International Monetary Fund,” Brown told participants at the two-day Progressive Governance conference. “It is absolutely clear that the global institutions that we built in the 1940s are quite incapable of dealing with the problems that we have now.”
Brown cited the World Bank as saying that 100 million people had been thrust into poverty as a result of the crisis, 30 million more people would be unemployed and half a million children would die because of poverty.
Host and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet also called for major reform of the IMF to make economic cooperation work.
“We need to coordinate the effort of countries on plans for fiscal stimulus,” Bachelet said.
IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Friday that more government stimulus plans may be needed next year to boost the world economy.
European countries including France and Germany have so far brushed off calls from the US to increase their spending plans, saying they have done enough and there should be more emphasis on financial regulation.
During a meeting in Brazil on Thursday, Brown and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva meanwhile proposed to create a US$100 billion global fund to boost trade.
Lula, US Vice President Joe Biden, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg also attended the Chile meeting, as well as Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner.
The conference was organized by Policy Network, an international think tank initiated 10 years ago by former US president Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, Bachelet unwittingly embarrassed Brown when she said Chile had put aside money during good economic times to help it through the downturn.
Standing next to Bachelet at a news conference, Brown heard Bachelet extol economic policies that Brown’s Conservative opponents at home have repeatedly said he should have followed before the global financial crisis.
“I would say that because of our decision during ... the good times in copper prices, we decided to save some of the money for the bad times and I would say that policy today is producing good results,” Bachelet said in English.
Brown has pumped extra money into the British economy to help counteract the downturn. But the Conservatives say his maneuvering room is limited because he failed to “fix the roof” when the sun shone.
“Gordon Brown is getting lessons from the Latin Americans about sound public finances. You couldn’t make it up,” Conservative finance spokesman George Osborne said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS