Foreign economists urge ‘global plan’

Leaders and economists from Western Europe to East Asia Tuesday urged the United States to go beyond reviving a failed domestic bailout and start working on a new global financial system.

“The Americans don’t have a choice — they must absolutely have a global plan,” Christian Noyer, head of the French central bank, said in Paris.

David Smick, a global strategist and author of “The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers of the Global Economy,” said the next U.S. president should immediately call for a second “Bretton Woods” conference to devise a new doctrine of international finance.

The tiny New Hampshire town hosted a conference shortly after World War II that established rules for economic interchange among the world’s industrial powers and created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“I am convinced that the sickness runs deep and that we need to rethink the entire financial and monetary system, as we did in Bretton Woods … to create the tools for worldwide regulation made necessary by the globalization of trade,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in the French city of Toulon on Monday.

He said that officials from France, Britain, Germany and Italy will meet next week in Paris with the Continent’s top financial officials to prepare for a proposed global summit on the economic crisis. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet will participate.

The 27-nation European Union said Tuesday that the crisis “has become a global problem” and Washington has a “special responsibility” to resolve it.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel took aim at the House failure to pass the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal, which sparked a global stock market plunge. She called the package a “precondition for creating new confidence in the markets.”

Kaoru Yosano, the Japanese minister of economic and fiscal policy, agreed. “The outcome has caused a major impact on not only the U.S. economy but also the world economy,” he said.

Until a few weeks ago, foreign governments were blase and even gloated about U.S. financial woes, Mr. Smick said. “The decoupled theory has taken a crash landing,” demand is plummeting worldwide and foreign financial institutions have been forced to come to terms with their own “toxic waste,” he said.

EU officials blamed U.S. policies and business practices for the meltdown, while the Vatican denounced corporate greed.

“The United States must take its responsibility in this situation, must show statesmanship for the sake of their own country, and for the sake of the world,” said European Commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger. “The turmoil that we are facing has originated in the United States.”

The Bush administration sought to calm politicians and markets, assuring them that it has been “reflecting” on developments and promising long-term solutions.

David McCormick, undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said Washington will take into account any potential global impact when it makes decisions about “how the U.S. regulatory structure should evolve.”

However, the State Department said the United States had to pass its own legislation first.

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