Word: browne
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...sight of an ascendant Brown sticks in the craws of Conservatives. In private, they're Oliver Hardys, expostulating over the nice mess they say Brown has gotten the country into. In public, they mostly retreat from confrontation like a herd of Stan Laurels. Opposition parties have pledged for now to support the government's efforts to end the turmoil, but are itching to emphasize Brown's own role in creating it. "When he rewrote financial regulation in 1997, Gordon Brown took away the Bank of England's power to call time on the build-up of debt," Conservative Shadow Chancellor...
...Brown's speed-of-light transformation from champion of market liberalization to strict regulator has left even his allies shaking their heads in disbelief. "Who would have dreamed that a financial crisis would have given Labour a lifeline?" marvels former Home Secretary David Blunkett. One reason is that Brown has shifted blame to greedy bankers (he inveighs against "the age of irresponsibility") and to America's subprime mortgage debacle. "It is pretty clear to me that this problem started in America," Brown declared as he unveiled the bank bailout. The idea of a global contagion originating in a distant country...
...another era, this seemed wonkish and worthy, hardly the stuff of stirring political phrasemaking. Today, though, Brown looks prescient. "We must now go further and develop new global structures for the global age. The events of recent months have pointed out inadequacies in our understanding of the interrelationships between financial markets and between countries." That could be a Brown sound bite from yesterday, but it comes from a 1998 speech on Asia's market meltdown. Speaking to TIME last spring, he worried about the danger of "national supervisors and global flows of capital ... Nobody has quite understood...
...Brown is in his element, a lame duck confounding expectations by soaring high. (Aides warn him against looking cheerful.) His critics take comfort from history: an ungrateful British public voted Churchill out of office at war's end. Still, by that logic Brown is safe until the financial turbulence subsides. For a Premier who only a month ago was staring defeat in the face, the world's economic nightmare looks like an economic miracle...
...made by Treasury officials tearing up their 2009 budgets. With the economy slowing, tax receipts are lower than expected, and in Britain, France and elsewhere government spending is higher than forecast. Now comes the bank bailout, and with it, a huge increase in government borrowing. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been the first to detail his national package, and it's making fiscal hawks shudder. It involves injecting up to $65 billion into three British banks - Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB - in exchange for equity stakes...