CBI conference: Gordon Brown speech

CBI conference: Gordon Brown speech; Brown answering question SOT - Let me deal with Anthony’s question first. Sovereign wealth funds are increasingly important, I am told that their resources will move from something in the order of two or three trillion to twelve trillion. But a lot depends of course, on what happens to oil prices. We are an open environment for investment by sovereign wealth funds. And I make that absolutely clear, we are encouraging sovereign wealth funds to invest in the British economy. Our own investments: we are forming British financial investments to take the investments that we have in the banking system and put them into an arms length group. We have already announced that Philip Hampton will be the chairman of that, and John Kingman the Managing Director. But our assets in the banks, I want to stress, are temporary. We have no desire to be permanent shareholders in banks. We are not going back to the age where government was expected to invest in absolutely everything. That is not what we want to do. Our role in holding shares in the banks was to take the banks through a difficult situation and then to provide for new investors to come in, and that is what we will do. You have a point about the shareholder executive which manages our shares in all the other industries for which we have got partial stakes. That is the Shareholders Executive that will work side by side with British Financial Investments. Let me stress, the investments that we have had to take are investments for the short term and not the long term. I do agree that in this situation where we are actually seeing that there are opportunities ahead in the global economy, if we can solve what I think are probably the inevitable difficulties of the transition to a global economy. If you are having a global economy, you have got to create global financial markets that work. You have got to deal with the restructuring that has got to take place as a result o...