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Bush: Government not crisis 'cure-all'
AFP - Friday, November 14
NEW YORK (AFP) - - US President George W. Bush, poised to host global economic crisis talks, called Thursday for reforms to avert future meltdowns but sternly warned against seeing government action as a "cure-all."
"The crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system," Bush said in a prepared speech to lay out his agenda for a Friday and Saturday summit in Washington.
"Our aim should not be more government -- it should be smarter government," he said to his prospective guests. "It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success."
The White House released the text of the remarks, which came just two months before he steps down and president-elect Barack Obama inherits what some are calling the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Four months after explaining the crisis by joking "Wall Street got drunk," Bush rejected any effort to blame weak US regulations for the international meltdown he said "ignited" when the US housing bubble burst.
"Many European countries had much more extensive regulations and still experienced problems almost identical to our own," he said. "We must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all."
It was unclear to whom Bush's warnings about dismantling international capitalism were addressed, and the White House would only say that the US president was restating a commitment to free trade as an engine for growth.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the European Union's rotating leadership, pushed for a top-to-bottom review of international financial regulatory bodies after the crisis flared in early September.
Bush has said it will be up to his successor on January 20 to undertake any major overhaul of US rules -- without which a serious reworking of global regulations would likely be impossible.
"The leaders attending this weekend's meeting agree on a clear purpose: To address the current crisis, and lay the foundation for reforms that will help prevent a similar crisis in the future," Bush said.
"We also agree that this undertaking is too large to be accomplished in a single discussion. So this summit will be the first in a series," said Bush.
Created in 1999, the G20 accounts for 85 percent of the world economy and about two-thirds of its population.
Its members are the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Britain and Canada, the European Union, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey.
International Monetary Fund and World Bank officials are also due to attend.
Amid calls for enhancing those international institutions' role, Bush said both must "reform" and "modernize" the way they make decisions.
"They should consider extending greater voting power to dynamic developing nations -- particularly as they increase their contributions to these institutions. They should also consider ways to streamline their executive boards, and make them more representative," he said.
Bush, who worked with the US Congress to craft a 700-billion-dollar bailout of troubled US banks, praised international cooperation thus far but warned: "This crisis did not develop overnight, and it will not be solved overnight."
"There will be more difficult days ahead. But the United States and our partners are taking the right steps to get through the crisis, and they are working," said the US president.
With many looking to blame lax US regulatory structures for the meltdown, Bush said "outdated regulatory structures and poor risk management practices" had particularly hurt large international financial institutions.
Bush called for improving accounting rules for securities so that their "true value" is clear, requiring that credit default swaps go through centralized clearinghouses rather than "over-the-counter" markets, taking news steps against market manipulation or fraud.
He also called for harmonizing laws among nations.
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US President George W. Bush, seen here in Washington, DC on November 12, 2008, Thursday that the global economic crisis was not "a failure of the free market system" and warned against seeing government intervention as "a cure-all."
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