Gordon Brown is promoting his plan for an international regulator to oversee the international financial markets and prevent further economic turbulence during talks with world leaders in New York. The prime minister convened a meeting of leaders - including Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero, European commission president Jose Barrroso, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen - to discuss the global credit crisis at in the Waldorf hotel last night. On his way to New York, Brown revealed he was examining the way British pension funds facilitate short selling by lending their stock to hedge funds. Brown praised the bail out of Wall Street, saying it was necessary to stop the financial institutions freezing up by removing illiquid or so-called toxic assets. The prime minister is fighting for a multi-part package with world leaders, but has no meeting scheduled with senior US Treasury figures as they battle in Washington with Congress to win legislative approval for the $700bn package. He has called for international regulation, greater transparency and responsibility in executive bonuses to encourage longer-term decision making. Brown believes the IMF, working with the Financial Stability Forum - a group of central banks, regulators and international bodies - "should be at the heart of an early warning system for financial turbulence affecting the global economy". The forum is due to report on a proposal in autumn. He has also been privately testing the water to see whether there are grounds for restarting world trade talks in the near future. Many world leaders are in New York for the special UN general assembly devoted to trying to meet the millennium development goals, as well as former US president Bill Clinton's annual Global Initiative meeting. Initial polls suggest Brown's standing in the polls has been boosted by his promise in his conference speech to be the rock of stability in the credit crisis. Brown is determined to spend the two days in New York fighting both for more money for the world's poor and a weighty package to sort out the credit crisis. Brown will be aware that the economy can swing votes massively, and will have witnessed the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, enjoying a poll surge as the Republicans suffer from the incumbency factor. Brown insists he has done everything he needed to increase liquidity in UK markets, and privately complains the crisis could have been minimised had his proposals on international regulation been implemented earlier. He says his form of risk-based regulation has worked, but the scale of the new financial instruments outwitted the regulators. Brown is concerned that the costs of the credit crisis, as well as the economic down turn, will mean the developed world turns off the tap on funding to alleviate poverty. He has been working on ambitious packages on education, health and eradicating deaths from malaria by 2015. His aides, as well as some of the celebrities accompanying him, such as supermodel Elle Macpherson, have spoken of fears of donor fatigue as people struggle to pay the rent. Macpherson is determined to stress that aid does help fight poverty. The supermodel was accompanying Sarah Brown, the prime minister's wife, along with Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, a dedicated charity worker, to a leader's wives dinner convened to raise awareness for Brown's White Ribbon Alliance and Safe Motherhood charity. The dinner in Manhatten was co-hosted by Queen Rania of Jordan and Wendi Murdoch, the wide of the media mogul.We need international regulation to protect global economy, Brown tells world leaders
Gordon Brown uses New York meeting to promote his plan for installing international regulator to survey world markets
Thursday, 25 September 2008
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