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EVENT:
Monday, 9th February 2009
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Road to the London Summit – Conversation with Prime Minister Gordon Brown
at Lancaster House, London
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On Monday, 9th February the Cabinet Office and the Brookings Institute-CIGI-CFGS held an event to discuss the aims of the London Summit at the Lancaster House. The discussion with Prime Minister Gordon Brown around the responses to the global economic crisis was moderated by Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute.
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An excerpt of the introduction speech by Richard Baldwin is reprinted below (a short video of Gordon Brown commenting on the role of international organizations in the management of the crisis can be found here):
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“Few world leaders have the intellectual confidence to see the current crisis for what it is. This crisis is the economic political challenge of our generation. The crisis started easy enough as a classic crisis of overleveraged banks and a mass of bad loans. But in September 2008 everything changed. The crisis - which we used to call the subprime crisis – spread in unexpected ways and at unexpected speed. From late September 2008 the writing was on the wall. Few world leaders read the writings and few among those could believe their eyes. Ben Bernanke and Gordon Brown belong to the few who had the intellectual confidence to realize that this crisis was entirely different that it required immediate and energetic action. The Bank Plan of October 2008 was one example of how Gordon Brown understood and had the confidence to take actions that were politically risky in the short run, but essential to the long run health of the economy.”
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