Gordon Brown’s prescription
In his first major address since departing as Britain’s prime minister in May, Gordon Brown used a Harvard lecture Thursday night (Sept. 23) to call for “a fundamental shift in the way the world works.” Delivering the annual Malcolm Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), the one-time university academic and chancellor of the exchequer offered a prescription for a still-reeling world economy, which he called “the first crisis of the global age.” Brown, an authority on international economics who spent the week at Harvard’s Institute of Politics as the Heffernan Visiting Fellow, called for more fiscal coordination — specifically a global financial institution with its own constitution. That constitution, he said, would require the financial sectors around the world to be transparent, to have sufficient capital and liquidity, and to be overseen by a coordinated system of international regulation. “Choices have to be made,” Brown told a capacity...