FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER Gordon Brown has admitted some responsibility for the economic crisis, saying that he had made a “big mistake” concerning financial regulation ahead of the UK’s banking collapse.
Brown said that he had not realised the “entanglements” of global institutions ahead of the 2008 banking crisis, and that his government had set up the Financial Services Authority (FSA) believing that a threat would come from just one financial institution, the Telegraph reports. ”We didn’t understand just how entangled things were,” Brown said.
The ex-Prime Minister said that in the 1990s, when he was chancellor, he had been put under “relentless” pressure not to over-regulate, the BBC reports. He also painted a picture of how simplistic the government’s understanding of the situation was: “We did not understand how risk was spread across the system, we did not understand the entanglements of different institutions and we did not understand – even though we talked about it – just how global things were”.
Speaking at a conference in the US, Brown said that wile he accepted some responsibility, others were also to blame for the global financial crisis: “In a world where the understanding of what global meant was incomplete, I think many writers as well as many regulators made exactly the same mistake”.
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