"[Britain's prime minister] Gordon Brown has called for a 'new Bretton Woods' international agreement to prevent a repeat of the global financial meltdown," The Daily Telegraph reported. "In a speech to business leaders, the Prime Minister warned that the coming days would be a 'crucial time' for the world economy. "The Bretton Woods agreement... was a historic deal signed in 1944 to shore up the global economy after the Second World War. Under the deal, exchange rates were fixed for almost thirty years and the value of the dollar was linked to gold, ensuring its status as a global currency. "This brought the global economy under control and stopped reckless economic activity. The agreement also established the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and other international bodies." The Times said: "Mr Brown is not the first major figure to propose a Bretton Woods 2. President Koehler of Germany, a former IMF head, and President Sarkozy have both made similar demands, but his call will carry extra weight given his record as Chancellor and his role in negotiating a co-ordinated approach to the current crisis. "Referring to the original conference, where the British economist John Maynard Keynes wielded immense influence, Mr Brown said today: 'With the same courage and foresight of their founders, we must now reform the international financial system around agreed principles of transparency, integrity, responsibility, good housekeeping and cooperation across borders.' " Anatole Kaletsky wrote: "Since the creation of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1944 every global financial initiative of any significance has been devised, led and co-ordinated by the US Government. This US leadership did not mean that America always got its way in financial affairs - nor that US co-ordination always succeeded, as exemplified by the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971. But it did mean that international financial initiatives were never attempted until ideas and the leadership came from Washington. The sole exception to this rule in the past 30 years was the creation of the euro; but this was viewed in Washington as an intra-European affair with limited global consequences. "The present global banking crisis has been a very different matter, since it originates in the US itself. Even a few weeks ago a solution without US leadership would have been inconceivable. In the past few days, however, the failure of the Bush Administration to follow through in any concrete way on the $700 billion 'Paulson package' that it rammed so painfully through the Congress, has focused attention on Washington's vacuum of leadership and ideas. Aghast at the dithering incompetence of the US in handling this crisis, European politicians have realised that Henry Paulson, the supposedly brilliant US Treasury Secretary, was an emperor with no clothes. Instead of waiting for US leadership, they had to take responsibility for Europe's problems. In trying to do this, they have found an unlikely intellectual guide and champion: the British Treasury and Gordon Brown." Paul Krugman - who on Monday won the Nobel Prize for Economics - wrote in The New York Times: "the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn't been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own." In The Financial Times, Wolfgang Munchau wrote: "The UK bank recapitalisation scheme was the first useful contribution politics has made since the crisis broke out 14 months ago. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, gave the Europeans a lesson in political leadership when other leaders were running for cover and reverting to spin doctoring. "But there are still many dangers ahead. The market for credit default swaps may explode at any time. A severe recession could trigger a sharp rise in defaults with reverberations in credit markets and banks. And if we squander money rescuing the wrong banks, which we have done in parts of Europe, we may not have enough leeway to launch an effective stimulus programme. At best we may have succeeded in calming the markets for a week. But we have not solved this crisis yet."
McCain promises to "fight for what's right for America"
"Top Republican strategists believe John McCain's stalled presidential campaign can only be revived if the Arizona senator takes an immediate and decisive turn in direction, one marked by an almost unwavering focus on the economy and a sharp break from Bush administration economic policy," Politico reported. "While Barack Obama's past associations with controversial figures such as former radical William Ayers should be a part of McCain's closing argument, they say, the GOP nominee needs to primarily concentrate on the historic nature of the current economic crisis and explain why he is better suited to lead the country out of it. " 'Either McCain wins the argument over the economy or he loses,' said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House. 'When the economy is this central to everybody's life, when everybody is as worried as they are now, then when you are not talking about the economy you are not winning.' " William Kristol wrote in The New York Times: "It's time for John McCain to fire his campaign. "He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama's. The Obama team is well organised, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed. "He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless - and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters. "But I'm not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn't Bush. The media isn't all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership." The San Francisco Chronicle reported: "McCain's senior adviser Sen Lindsey Graham promised over the weekend that McCain would debut new economic proposals that would include lowering tax rates for investors and cutting the capital gains tax. "But the Arizona Senator - in words that could describe his troubled campaign as much as the country's economic problems - chose instead today to deliver a fighting address in Virginia aimed at rousing supporters and urging them to stay the course in the presidential race. " 'The hour is late, the troubles are getting worse; we have to change direction now. ... We have to fight,' McCain said. 'We have 22 days to go. We're six points down. The national media has written us off,' he told supporters. 'My friends, we've got them just where we want them.' "McCain's speech came as Obama did release new economic stimulus proposals in Ohio, including calls for a three month moratorium on home foreclosures, a temporary tax credit for job-creating firms, and allowing families to withdraw up to 15 per cent of their retirement savings without facing penalties." In The New Republic, John B Judis wrote: " 'This election,' said John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, on the second day of the Republican convention, 'is not about issues.' And he meant it. The convention that Davis helped assemble devoted strikingly little time to policy. Instead, the focus was on McCain's biography. Fred Thompson set the tone early in the convention, using his address to recount McCain's life story, especially his stint as a prisoner of war. In state delegation meetings during the week, the campaign enlisted the candidate's fellow POWs to tell delegates of his experiences in Vietnam. During McCain's acceptance speech - which also reflected on his years in captivity - delegates waved signs reading REAL AMERICAN HERO. McCain, the convention made clear, was not running for president based on foreign policy or economics - or ideology of any sort at all. He was running on heroism." The Washington Post described how Mr McCain's "pursuit of command" shaped both his political and military career. "To endure their long ordeal, John McCain and the other US servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: 'If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay.' "Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. 'He was talking about his father to us and then he said: "I want to be president of the United States. Someday I'm going to be president," ' Stratton recalls. 'If the cell wasn't so small, we'd have been rolling around laughing.' "His friend, thought Stratton, ought to be concentrating far less on his fantasy and more on how to redirect a naval career that had been adrift before he was shot down over Hanoi. 'We reminded him that he had dug himself a big hole with his demerits in the past and nearly being the bottom man of his class at the Naval Academy,' Stratton recalls. 'And now he was talking about being president? "Come on, John. Get your career straightened out." ' "Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father's perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service's highest uniformed position, didn't always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed."
pwoodward@thenational.ae
