1 Boring Old Man

In U.S. Visit, Brown To Urge ‘New Deal’
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post
March 3, 2009

LONDON, March 2 — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrives in Washington this week to press a "global new deal" that he hopes will shore up his sagging poll numbers at home and solidify his place as the international leader of efforts to surmount the deepening financial crisis. On Tuesday, Brown will become the first European leader to meet with Obama at the White House, and he will address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

"He is hoping to be seen as a genuine global leader," said Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. "He wants to show that he is the big man on the big stage when the big crisis hits." A month before Brown hosts President Obama and leaders of the world’s major economies in London on April 2, he will press his case for an overhaul of the world’s financial regulations and institutions.

"President Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York," Brown wrote in the Sunday Times newspaper. Obama’s decision to meet with Brown before other European leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been interpreted in Britain as a symbolic victory. But Peter Kellner, head of the British polling firm YouGov, said that although Brown’s meeting with Obama is important, it may not be as important as his address to Congress.

"These things are normally mostly ceremonial, but Brown’s speech to Congress is the biggest single event of the trip," Kellner said…

Global recession is fault of US, Brown to tell Congress
PM pinpoints poor regulation and sub-prime crisis in America as being at the root of economic crisis
By Patrick Wintour and Andrew Sparrow
guardian.co.uk
3 March 2009

Gordon Brown will reject the calls of cabinet colleagues to accept responsibility for the economic crisis when he makes a landmark speech to the US Congress tomorrow.

In the speech, the fifth by a serving British prime minister to both houses on Capitol Hill, Brown is in no mood to admit that the British government bears any responsibility for the crisis, insisting it is a banking failure caused by lack of regulation in the US and the rise of sub-prime mortgages. In an interview in the Daily Telegraph today, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, acknowledged there were "a lot of lessons" to be learnt from a "culture" of limited regulation that encouraged bankers to take risks. Ed Balls, the schools secretary and another close ally of Brown, also admitted "it is clear we were nowhere near tough enough". The comments chime with criticism by Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority.

But Brown insists this is not a typical recession caused by a government allowing inflation to rear out of control, and is instead the product of the failure of an international regulatory system to stay abreast of globalisation.

In an interview with National Public Radio this morning, Brown said the global banking collapse needed a global solution. He called for the same standards in banking "of remuneration, accountability, transparency and disclosure all round the world", saying it would lead to a restoration of confidence in banking…

Criticisms "welcome" [make that "appreciated"]. I like Gordon Brown. He got out of Iraq and stopped making nice with Bush like Dapper Tony Blair. It’s interesting that the British commentators see him as grandstanding. I don’t know that about him. But we could use another "British Invasion" given the performance of our own economists [the  economic  economist’s crisis…]. We’ve made a rapid return to the economics of John Maynard Keynes since the recent failure of our free market models – the Monetarism of Milton Friedman. Maybe adding a British accent would smooth the transition.

On a more serious note, Gordon Brown’s advertised message is solid. It is our fault. And "PM pinpoints poor regulation and sub-prime crisis in America as being at the root of economic crisis" is spot on target. But it’s only a preface to the blame. Everything Bu$hCo did seems wrong. He cut taxes, not as an antedote to a recession but as a tool to get elected or help his rich friends. He increased spending by starting a massive, un-necessary war and kept it "off the books" much like the Enron method of burying debt in "other" accounts. He "leveraged" America to a record level foreign debt. He encouraged the "housing bubble" as policy. He took the term "free market economy" as meaning he didn’t have to think about the economy, so he didn’t. And he modeled corruption as a national pastime. But of all of that, perhaps his worst legacy was to actively nurture a partisan divide that seems impenetrable – diverting the whole energy of his Party into pointless bickering as a Party Platform, destroying the opportunity of Republicans to participate in our attempts to get things on an even keel.