Europe wants fast action from world finance summit

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who like French President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged an overhaul of the world financial bodies established after World War Two, said that reversing the global economic slowdown was just as vital.
"It is not the right time for short-term cuts in investment and public spending," the spokesman said. "There is now an emerging consensus across the developed world of the need to use fiscal policy in tandem with economic policy to support economic growth, and this is a point that the prime minister will be making (in Brussels)."

Redefining Bretton Woods?
As Ngaire Woods, of Oxford University, argued in a paper published in June, "the problem for the IMF and the World Bank is that their governance structures are locked in the past." The World Bank is headquartered in Washington, home of the world's largest debtor, she argues, yet "today global development finance is increasingly accessed directly from private sources and emerging economies such as China, the Gulf States, India and Brazil."