Sarkozy urges new meeting of Europe's top economies

LONDON (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday he hoped Britain would organise a new meeting of Europe's big four economies on financial markets in October, but British officials took a wait-and-see stance.

"On financial market transparency, I refer to the meeting we had in London at the end of January, and I hope you will organise another one in October," Sarkozy told Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a news conference in London.

Sarkozy, Brown and the leaders of Germany, Italy and the European Commission met in January to decide how to tackle global financial turmoil, calling for closer economic cooperation and for banks to be more open about risk.

Brown's spokesman would not confirm there would be new talks in October, saying: "At some point we think it would be useful to have another such meeting, but as and when we are in a position to confirm that we'll let you know."

A British government source said London's short-term focus was on forthcoming meetings of the Group of Seven and Group of Eight leading industrial countries, which he said were both very good forums for discussions on financial stability.

"If, come October, it looks like that kind of meeting (among the four European powers) is called for we'll talk about it then," the source said.

G7 finance ministers and central bankers are due to meet in Washington in April while G8 finance ministers are due to meet in Japan in June before a July summit.

Brown and Sarkozy took forward some of the ideas from the January meeting in talks on Thursday, when they called for greater transparency in financial markets to ensure banks made full and prompt disclosure of write-offs.

Banks have written down more than $125 billion (62.5 million pounds) of assets due to the credit squeeze and some estimates put the scale of bad debts on banks' books as high as $600 billion.

(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Ian Jones)