British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on world leaders to set about reforming international financial institutions to prevent a repeat of the circumstances that led to the current financial crisis.
Brown said the world needed a new Bretton Woods agreement, referring to the 1944 conference that laid the foundations of the post-World War II economic order by creating the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
"We've got to be far bolder and far more imaginative," Brown said. "We want to create a global society. But we need to have global institutions that work and the problem is the institutions we built 60 years ago are out of date."
With world financial ministers due to gather in London in April for the G20 summit, Brown said governments were dealing with the "first financial crisis of the global age."