From Carnage of Crisis Rises Vast Opportunity

The British plan to recapitalize world banks helped calm global markets, but Gordon Brown isn't done yet. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, the prime minister declares that we face "a defining moment for the world economy" on par with the aftermath of World War II, and that only a "new Bretton Woods"—a new system of global financial governance—can end the crisis and pave the way forward.

The IMF, World Bank, and other international institutions "have to be rebuilt for a wholly new era in which there is global, not national, competition and open, not closed, economies," Brown writes, That means cross-border regulation, limits on executive pay, and an end to "beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism." And finally, writes Brown, we must see the crisis as an opportunity, one that will allow us to call 2008 "the year we started to build the world anew." (More Gordon Brown stories.)