Couchepin blasts G20

Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin has slammed the G20, the world's 20 leading economies and compared the OECD to a restaurant guide.

He said the G20 had created a form of “new world government”, abasing the United Nations (UN) and degrading the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to a ratings agency.

“In this [financial] crisis the OECD shouldn’t be dishing out stars to good and bad states like a restaurant guide. It should instead serve them as a research centre, studying the causes and consequences of the crisis,” Couchepin told the Sonntag newspaper.

He added that the G20 had failed to analyse the situation at its recent summit in London.

“Money isn’t the answer to this crisis,” he said, pointing out that the sums discussed were like the G20 itself – “forgotten three days later”.

In Couchepin’s view Europe and the United States were engaged in a power struggle. Europe – and Switzerland – had “good social values” and invested to maintain the population’s propensity to consume, whereas the US was having to generate new jobs immediately – “and is demanding the rest of the world help them do that”.

The interior minister also said it wasn’t a case of Switzerland versus the powerful European states. “We must think of the others,” he said. “But we must think of ourselves first.”

swissinfo with agencies