10 Dec 2009

Brown, Sarkozy call for global market reform

10:01 pm on 10 December 2009

British prime minister Gordon Brown and French president Nicolas Sarkozy have called for reform to the way global financial markets are run.

In a joint article in the New York newspaper the Wall Street Journal, the two European leaders say one priority should be a global one-off tax on bank bonuses.

They say it is "simply not acceptable" for taxpayers to cover the cost of bank failures but not benefit from their successes.

The financial crisis, they say, has made them "recognise that we are now in an economy which is no longer national but global, so financial standards must also be global...

"People rightly want a post-crisis banking system which puts their needs first. To achieve that, nothing less than a global change is required."

British finance minister Alistair Darling has just announced a one-off supertax on banker bonuses in a pre-Budget report on Wednesday.

The Brown-Sarkozy letter comes ahead of an EU conference that will also address climate change.