At a conference in Chile ahead of a key G20 summit in London this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for global unity and reform of the IMF to face the fallout of the economic crisis.
Brown will host world leaders from the G20 industrialized and developing economies for a crucial summit aimed at coordinating global efforts to fight the economic downturn and preventing similar crises.
“We cannot solve the problem of global financial instability without there being a global solution,” Brown told center-left leaders and policy makers at a two-day conference in the Chilean resort town of Vina del Mar, due to end yesterday.
“We must reform the International Monetary Fund,” Brown told participants at the two-day Progressive Governance conference. “It is absolutely clear that the global institutions that we built in the 1940s are quite incapable of dealing with the problems that we have now.”
Brown cited the World Bank as saying that 100 million people had been thrust into poverty as a result of the crisis, 30 million more people would be unemployed and half a million children would die because of poverty.
Host and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet also called for major reform of the IMF to make economic cooperation work.
“We need to coordinate the effort of countries on plans for fiscal stimulus,” Bachelet said.
IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Friday that more government stimulus plans may be needed next year to boost the world economy.
European countries including France and Germany have so far brushed off calls from the US to increase their spending plans, saying they have done enough and there should be more emphasis on financial regulation.
During a meeting in Brazil on Thursday, Brown and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva meanwhile proposed to create a US$100 billion global fund to boost trade.
Lula, US Vice President Joe Biden, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg also attended the Chile meeting, as well as Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner.
The conference was organized by Policy Network, an international think tank initiated 10 years ago by former US president Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, Bachelet unwittingly embarrassed Brown when she said Chile had put aside money during good economic times to help it through the downturn.
Standing next to Bachelet at a news conference, Brown heard Bachelet extol economic policies that Brown’s Conservative opponents at home have repeatedly said he should have followed before the global financial crisis.
“I would say that because of our decision during ... the good times in copper prices, we decided to save some of the money for the bad times and I would say that policy today is producing good results,” Bachelet said in English.
Brown has pumped extra money into the British economy to help counteract the downturn. But the Conservatives say his maneuvering room is limited because he failed to “fix the roof” when the sun shone.
“Gordon Brown is getting lessons from the Latin Americans about sound public finances. You couldn’t make it up,” Conservative finance spokesman George Osborne said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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