Gordon Brown today threw his weight behind calls for "a new Bretton Woods" agreement to set the rules and direction for global trade and finance in the 21st century.

Fresh from pumping £37 billion into emergency bank nationalisations, the Prime Minister told a City audience that he would be pushing his fellow European leaders this week on the need to rewrite the rules of the international financial system after the current market shock.

“Around us we must build a new Bretton Woods - a new financial architecture for the years ahead," Mr Brown said. "Sometimes it does take a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago can no longer be postponed."

The Bretton Woods conference, held in July 1944 at a hotel in New Hampshire, helped draw up the post-war financial order, establishing both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Mr Brown is not the first major figure to propose a Bretton Woods 2: President Koehler of Germany, a former IMF head, and President Sarkozy have both made similar demands, but his call will carry extra weight given his record as Chancellor and his role in negotiating a co-ordinated approach to the current crisis.

Referring to the original conference, where the British economist John Maynard Keynes wielded immense infuence, Mr Brown said today: “With the same courage and foresight of their founders, we must now reform the international financial system around agreed principles of transparency, integrity, responsibility, good housekeeping and cooperation across borders.

“First transparency. We must now insist on openness and disclosure, with an immediate adoption of the internationally agreed accounting standards ­­- and the standards being brought forward for the valuation of assets. And transparency must extend also to markets, including the trillion dollar credit insurance markets which now play such a central role in shifting risk around the system.

“Second integrity. We must tackle once and for all the conflicts of interest which have distorted behaviour and undermined trust, and now lie at the heart of public concern."

He went on: “We will not stop at immediate measures to stabilise the system. We also need measures to reshape the global financial system to make it fit for purpose for the future. This work is important for building confidence and this work must start today.

"And we must start by recognising that we are now in a global financial system and that while we have already global flows of capital we have supervision only at a national level.

“And just as we need new global coordination to deal with the waves of change that are defining the new global age from energy supply to climate change, so we need enhanced global cooperation to monitor and then supervise financial flows that know no borders.

“The global financial system is too clouded with opacity, conflicts of interest, irresponsible risk taking, and when problems occur countries have tended to look inwards and deal with them in isolation when it is clear they should look outwards and join in international cooperation.

“This cannot simply be a short term rescue to paper over the cracks. Only a surgical approach that gets to the root of the problem will now work to ensure the problems do not return.”

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