LONDON: The G20 leaders had agreed to create a new supervisory body to flag potential problems in the global financial system, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said yesterday.

Wives of some G20 leaders pose for a photograph on stage at the Royal Opera House in London yesterday. [Agencies]

The summit host said the G20 will create a new financial stability board to ensure cooperation across frontiers, to spot risks to the world economy and - together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - provide "the early warning mechanism that this new global economy needs".

He said it was essential that the world did everything necessary to "rebuild trust" and make sure "a crisis such as this" never happens again.

G20 leaders agreed that blacklists of tax havens should be published and vowed to crack down on them.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brown said that Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would circulate a list of countries that serve as tax havens.

Sarkozy, who has advocated tougher rules against tax havens, said: "The time of banking secrecy has passed."

Leaders like Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have been calling for tighter regulations on the banking sectors, which they believe are main culprits of the ongoing financial crisis.

The leaders agreed "there will be an end to tax havens that do not transfer information on request. Banking secrecy of the past must come to an end", Brown said.

Sarkozy said the results of yesterday's summit were beyond what could have been imagined.

The global economy is expected to contract in 2009 by between 0.5 and 1.0 percent, according to the IMF, whose head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is calling it a "Great Recession".

FSB calls for regulation

The leaders yesterday agreed to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandage as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF).

The forum of leading central bankers and regulatory bodies yesterday also joined the call to regulate lenders.

It said that bonuses at banks must be supervised this year to try to discourage risky investments that helped bring several companies to the brink of bankruptcy.

[1] [2] 下一页