And you’re to be congratulated because you have shown extraordinary energy and leadership and initiative in laying the groundwork for this summit. All of us owe Prime Minister Brown an extraordinary debt of gratitude for his preparations in what I believe will be a historic and essential meeting of the G20 nations.
Prime Minister Brown and I had a productive discussion this morning. Both of us greatly value the special relationship between our nations. The United States and the United Kingdom have stood together through thick and thin, through war and peace, through hard times and prosperity — and we’ve always emerged stronger by standing together. So I’m pleased that my first meeting overseas as President is with Gordon Brown, just as I was pleased to host him in Washington shortly after taking office. And I know that we both believe that the relationship between our two countries is more than just an alliance of interests; it’s a kinship of ideals and it must be constantly renewed.
In our meeting this morning we covered a complex and wide-ranging agenda. It begins, of course, with the global economy. All of us here in London have the responsibility to act with a sense of urgency, and I think that what Prime Minister Brown spoke about, the human dimensions of this crisis — people losing their homes, losing their businesses that they’ve worked so hard for, losing their health care in the United States; people around the world who were already desperate before the crisis and they find themselves even more desperate afterwards — that’s what our agenda has to begin with, and that’s where it will end.
All of us here in London have the responsibility to act with a sense of urgency, and every nation that will be participating has been affected by a crisis that has cost us so much in terms of jobs, savings and the economic security of our citizens. So make no mistake, we are facing the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the global economy is now so fundamentally interconnected that we can only meet this challenge together. We can’t create jobs at home if we’re not doing our part to support strong and stable markets around the world.
The United States is committed, working alongside the United Kingdom, to doing whatever it takes to stimulate growth and demand, and to ensure that a crisis like this never happens again. At home, we’re moving forward aggressively on both recovery and reform. We’ve taken unprecedented action to create jobs and restore the flow of credit. And we’ve proposed a clear set of tough, new 21st-century rules of the road for all of our financial institutions. We are lifting ourselves out of this crisis and putting an end to the abuses that got us here.