The global economy is close to “staring down the barrel” and is threatened by the failure of eurozone leaders to agree a lasting settlement to stabilise the single currency, David Cameron warned on Thursday night.
As markets tumbled around the world, amid gloomy assessments from the IMF and the World Bank, the prime minister issued his gravest warning about the global economic outlook and bluntly told eurozone leaders to stop “kicking the can down the road”. “We are not quite staring down the barrel but the pattern is clear,” the prime minister told the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.
“The recovery out of the recession for the advanced economies will be difficult. Growth in Europe has stalled, growth in America has stalled. The effect of the Japanese earthquake, high oil and fuel prices is creating a drag on growth. But fundamentally we are still facing the aftermath of the world financial bust and economic collapse in 2008.”
Cameron’s speech came as Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned world leaders that “time is of the essence” as investors took fright at politicians’ failure to tackle sickly global growth and the spiralling eurozone debt crisis.
As Cameron spoke, the FTSE 100 index tumbled 246 points, or 4.67%, to close at 5041 – the blue-chip index’s worst daily fall in percentage terms since March 2009. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones index closed 3.5% down at 10773 points, while share prices in France and Germany also dropped sharply.
The prime minister identified one of the main problems as the failure of eurozone leaders to agree a “lasting solution” to stabilise the single currency.
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