Brown warns of 10 years of gloom
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned of 10 years of low growth and high unemployment unless a global solution was found to the Eurozone crisis.
Brown told reporters and delegates at the World Economic Forum in Daijin, China, that “You will need an international agreement, not just a euro area agreement, to sort out the problems that Europe now faces and the IMF will be involved in some stage in this in my view”.
He also said that the €400bn (£349bn) European Financial Stability Fund was insufficient to save the troubled single currency
The former Prime Minister said that the global financial crisis necessitated a rebalancing of exports and consumption between developing and developed economies.
He said that a global agreement on how to achieve growth was needed, and warned that a failure of coordination would, “lead in the end to greater protectionism.”
Brown was invited to chair a policy and initiatives coordination board at the WEF in April.
The board is intended to seek global cooperation on economic issues with an international impact.
Brown was Prime Minister when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, triggering the ongoing financial crisis.
He presided over UK government’s bailout of its banking sector, the outstanding sum of which was estimated by the National Audit Office in March to be £456bn.