No Joint European Strategy On Banks

Edward Cody
Washington Post
Sunday, Oct 5, 2008

But the European leaders did call for a global economic summit by year’s end aimed at revamping the international financial system, which is a legacy of a conference held at Bretton Woods, N.H., in the waning months of World War II.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Europe’s most vocal advocate of a continent-wide response, announced that for now, he and the leaders of Britain, Germany and Italy agreed in four hours of discussions only that each country would use “its own means” to safeguard banks from collapse but would do so “in a coordinated way.”

The outcome seemed to fall well short of the common policy that French and other officials had spoken of in recent days amid a rapid series of financial failures and a freezing up of the capital markets in Europe, which rival or by some measures exceed the size of the U.S. markets. The disunity in Europe also was apparent in complaints by some other countries that they were not even included in the discussion.

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Failure to pursue a broader bailout reflected particularly strong opposition from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain to any attempt at pooling resources for a Europe-wide fund to protect weak banks. Each government should handle its own banking problems, they said, because each country — and even each bank — has specific problems that must be dealt with in different ways.

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