Prime minister outlines five proposals to calm the financial markets.
Prime minister Gordon Brown has outlined five proposals to stabilise the turbulent financial markets.
In his speech at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday in Manchester, he said that all transactions needed to be transparent.
His second proposal was for sound banking with a requirement to demonstrate that risks could be managed and priced for good and bad times.
Third, he said that no member of a bank’s board should be able to say that they did not understand the risks they were running and walk away from them.
He said he would ensure bonuses were not based on short-term speculative deals but on hard work, effort and enterprise.
Finally, he said that global standards and supervision needed to be addressed. He said the flows of capital were global, therefore supervision could no longer just be national.
If implemented, he said these proposals would enable London to retain its rightful place as the financial centre of the world.
Brown hit out at the Conservative Party’s financial policies. He said they would have allowed Northern Rock to fold and thus imperilled the whole financial system, whereas Labour saved Northern Rock so that no UK depositor lost out.
He added that if the Conservatives policies were implemented there would be no regulation to protect homeowners.
Brown said: “Do you know what their Shadow Chancellor really said? In the week that banks were collapsing, the man who wants to run our economy not only said this was not a problem caused by the financial markets but went on to say, and I quote, ‘it’s a function of financial markets that people make loads of money out of the misery of others’.”
