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You are here: Home Finance & Business Financial crisis leaves euro with new popularity Europe searching for new financial system

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20/10/2008Europe searching for new financial system

The dust of the financial crisis still hasn't settled, as last week's events on the world's stock exchanges proved.

And calls for better control of international money flows, and for the free market to become a little less free, grew even louder. Does this mean that, to ensure a better future, we should return to the post-World War II period of austerity?
 
According to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the credit crisis has brought the global financial system "grinding to a halt." The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the European Union all called for the development of a new financial system. World leaders are expected to meet next month to devise a new 'Bretton Woods' agreement. Because while the original agreement, devised in 1944 and intended to guarantee a stable post-war economy, has proved its worth, it's evident that it needs renovating.

Foundations
Until recently, Britain was strongly opposed to any centralised control of the financial world. But even in London, which declined to embrace the introduction of the euro to avoid just such central control, the free market couldn't manage to keep the banking world the right way up. And it's Prime Minister Brown who is now the front-runner in arguing the case for a revision of the international finance system. And European leaders such as Angela Merkel, Jose Manuel Barroso, Wouter Bos and Nicolas Sarkozy are all stumbling over each other in their attempts to keep up with him.

The core of the message is this: we've survived a period of irresponsible risks and the unsupervised pursuit of money. Now it's time for a radical approach with a heavy emphasis on regulation and control. Even Dutch Finance Minister Wouter Bos has joined the revolution. "Strong markets need strong regulation," has been one of his regular sound bites. As well as, "If banks can't come up with a solution, then we'll think of one."
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