By Bernama,
London : European leaders have asked India to join a major economic summit, to prepare a response to the global financial meltdown which was sparked by the United States credit crisis, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported.
At a hastily convened meeting in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a summit in November where emerging powers like India, China and Brazil should join the Group of Eight industrialised nations — Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia and the United States.
He said the heads of the European Union’s four biggest economies – Germany, France, the UK and Italy – were united on the need to call all leading economic nations together to create “a new financial world just as Bretton Woods did 60 years ago”.
Sarkozy, in his role as EU President, said it was time for governments to clamp down on speculators and restore a moral element to the heart of a regime that had failed.
“We need to literally rebuild the international financial system. We want to lay the foundations of entrepreneurial capitalism, not speculative capitalism,” he said.
As part of a rolling program of announcements, the EU’s “big four” agreed to release US$ 24 billion of emergency aid to ailing small businesses across the E.U.
Germany repeated its opposition to the use of taxpayers’ funds to help ailing banks.