Brown to call for new global financial system

BRITAIN: Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown will push for a new international financial system that updates the Bretton Woods agreement in a speech to be delivered Monday evening.

Brown will call for the reforms at the G20 summit to be held in Washington next weekend.

“The British Government ... will begin to begin a new Bretton Woods with a new IMF that offers, by its surveillance of every economy, an early warning system and a crisis prevention mechanism for the whole world,” Brown will say at his speech at the annual Lord Mayor’s banquet in London.

Brown’s calls for a reformed IMF will echo calls by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University. Stiglitz told a U.N. General Assembly panel on the global financial crisis last month that the system created at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the international monetary protocols governing trade, banking and other financial relations among nations, needs to be updated. Brown has already discussed IMF reforms with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and has called on countries such as China and the oil-rich Persian Gulf states to fund the bulk of an increase in the International Monetary Fund’s bailout pot.

Brown will also say the world faces five major challenges - to promote democracy, fight terrorism, strengthen the global economy, tackle climate change and resolve conflict.

London, Monday, AP