Former UK Leader Tells Dartmouth: ‘Make Finance Global’

(May 21, 2012)  —  The former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has called for global decision-making on economic matters at a lecture with the future head of the World Bank.

Gordon Brown, the former UK Chancellor and PM who led the country amid the onset of the financial crisis, addressed an audience at the Tuck Business School of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire last week.

Brown said: “It’s time for a declaration of interdependence. The decisions that we should make, we should make together.”

He shared a stage with Dartmouth President, Jim Yong Kim, who is to take up the role of President of the World Bank in July.

The announcement last month of the future president’s appointment was showered with disapproval by some, who claimed Kim’s background had been overwhelmingly in healthcare, rather than finance. In July he is set to be in charge of a staff of 9,000 economists and development experts, and a loan portfolio that reached $258 billion last year.

Brown said: “I hold out the prospect that if we work together, if the leadership of (Kim) and others is effective, then we can in these next 10 or 15 years move from a world that in some cases seems unsustainable, and in some cases seems to be unfair, and in some cases actually seems to be irresponsible.”

Dartmouth has been the academic home to several leading economists. Alumni include former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  Former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee Member David ‘Danny’ Blanchflower joined the college in 1989 and is now Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics at the institution.

For an in-depth interview with Blanchflower, see the next issue of aiCIO, published in June.