Britain hopes to cooperate with others at the upcoming Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Seoul to help ensure the world doesn't suffer from another financial crisis, the top British envoy to South Korea said Thursday.
"What we hope to get out of the G-20 is a series of agreements on some very important issues to make sure we don't have another financial crisis like we did two, three years ago," Ambassador Martin Uden told reporters at an embassy press event.
Seoul is to host the G-20 summit on Nov. 11-12. South Korea is the first Asian country to stage the meeting and also the first outside the Group of Eight (G-8) to do so.
Uden said the British are paying less attention to the venue of the meeting than to "issues about how to get the world financial system back on track," in particular issues about currencies. He said participating states in the G-20 should ensure they can make progress on "the issues of international governance, including Basel III, or the New Bank Capital and Liquidity Rules. Bank regulators reached this agreement in September. It's designed to prevent a repeat of the recent global financial crisis and calls for lenders to build up thicker capital bases and make their capital more liquid."
Uden added that making progress on such issues would help the world develop "a more stable international financial system that isn't so fragile" and that is able to deal with the kind of crisis that affected the world recently.
As the envoy of a former host of a G-20 summit -- London ran the summit in April 2009 -- Uden said he was "100 percent confident" that South Korea would run the event "brilliantly."
"The most important thing about G-20 is to make sure that it works, that the leaders can come together and have a good forum in which they can discuss the issues of the day," Uden said. "That involves a whole range of things, including what you're doing at the moment, the preparation, like the finance ministers' meeting this weekend in Gyeongju (about 370 kilometres south of Seoul)."
Uden also said once visiting leaders leave Seoul, "they're going to look at the substances" of what Seoul had accomplished as the host.
"Did you make an agreement on this? Did you have a dispute about that? Frankly, Korea can't control all of that," Uden said. "But that's fine. That's why you need the G-20. If these were unimportant issues that nobody cared about, you would not need to assemble over 20 heads of state. It's because they're important, because they're difficult and because they're vital to the world economy."