A leaderless world is sleepwalking towards a repeat of its near meltdown in late 2008 and early 2009 because it has failed to remedy the causes of the financial crash of a decade ago, former prime minister Gordon Brown has warned.
Britain’s leader during the period when the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers put every major bank at risk, said that after a decade of stagnation the global economy was now moving into a decade of vulnerability.
Speaking to the Guardian at his home in Scotland, Brown delivered a scathing analysis of how the big problems of 2009 remained unresolved and said that much tougher action was needed to prevent wrongdoing by bankers.
Brown was instrumental in creating the G20 – a body made of the world’s leading developed and developing nations – but said the cooperation that helped avoid a second Great Depression had been replaced by a world in which countries had retreated into nationalist silos.
“We are in danger of sleepwalking into a future crisis,” Brown said when asked to assess the risks of a repeat of 2008. “There is going to have to be a severe awakening to the escalation of risks, but we are in a leaderless world.”
The former prime minister, who lost the 2010 election following Britain’s longest and deepest recession of the post-war era, said there was less scope to reduce interest rates than was the case a decade ago, no evidence that finance ministries would be allowed to cut taxes or increase public spending, and no guarantee that China would be as active in providing stimulus.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
