Brown and Sarkozy team up to tackle oil price volatility

PRIME Minister Gordon Brown joined French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday in an attempt to curtail oil price volatility, as part of a move towards tougher global governance to prevent a return to problems that existed before the financial crisis.

Speaking at a Franco-British summit ahead of a meeting of G8 leaders in Italy this week, Sarkozy said the two nations would publish a joint position on the issue of oil price volatility in coming days.

“We must, with the fossil fuel producing countries, try and stabilise the oil price in a reasonable range, neither too high nor too low,” Sarkozy said. “The world will not recover from these yo-yo effects that take us from one excess to another. There too, states must try to take a leading role and reintroduce some transparency and regulation,” he said.

Brown said producer and consumer countries should together study the oil market mechanisms that caused price swings and determine whether there was any “undue speculation”. If there was, countries should be prepared to take action, he said.

Brown added that “the writing is on the wall” for tax havens and called for a March 2010 deadline for the introduction of sanctions against such havens.