By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS,
London : The British finance minister said Monday India and other strong emerging economies will help bail out Britain from the current global economic downturn.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling gave the assessment on the first day of a most difficult annual conference for the Labour Party in the last two decades, with the ruling party trailing the opposition Conservatives by a massive 19 points in opinion polls.
Darling said a series of domestic banking sector regulations – including a strict supervision of bonuses paid out to bankers – combined with increased public sector borrowings will help Britain tackle inflationary challenges in the short term.
“When you look at the longer term, when you see economies like China, like India, like Brazil, the fact is that the world economy is growing and is continuing to grow.
“Whilst it is growing the opportunities for us and for other countries are absolutely immense, which is why I’m confident that we will get through it (the financial crisis), provided we take the right action now to stabilise the position,” Darling said.
“We will do that, we will get through this, and there’s no reason why our economy can’t then continue to grow just as we have seen in the last 10 years… and continue to do well as a country,” he added.
Darling said regulating banking bonuses was among a series of steps that the Financial Services Authority, Britain’s financial markets regulator, was looking at in order to discourage “people who take risks.”
He said the government wanted to make sure that “when people are given incentives, you don’t incentivise people who destabilise the situation”.
He said the government wanted to ensure that the bonus structure “rewards long term stability and does not encourage people to take risks.”
Part of the reason for the current financial crisis, Darling said, was that “banks became hopelessly exposed to risks that they didn’t fully understand – either the scale or the extent of them.”