By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982
Gordon Brown has given an hour long interview for today’s FT, in which he talks of his “cautious optimism for the future” of the British economy. The interview is ahead of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month.
The PM says:
“If you look at the position a year ago, last September and October, we had people predicting that the recession would become a depression with people thinking that their savings would be at risk as banks collapsed. We had very dire predictions about the levels to which unemployment could rise and we had this great fear in Britain at that time that mortgage repossessions would be very, very high indeed.
And I think over the last year what we’ve seen is that the banks have been stabilised but there are still big issues that I’m very happy to talk about that have got to be dealt with.
You’ve seen the world come together with what we never saw in the 1930s, which was co-ordinated action at a monetary and at a fiscal level, and you’ve had co-ordinated action also on standards in banking which is the first test really of whether the world can come together to create a regulatory system for the global economy.
And so, from where we were last September and October, there is definitely proof that when the world comes together it can make some difference. But it would be a historic mistake to think that we could now return to business as usual and it would be a missed opportunity of the highest level that would be the worst possible if we did not recognise that having tackled the instability of the banking system, we simply stopped there and did nothing more.”
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