Britain, Germany seek global finance summit

By Darren Ennis and Ingrid Melander

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain and Germany joined a French call on Wednesday for an international summit this year to overhaul of the world's financial order aimed at preventing a repeat of the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression.

European leaders meeting in Brussels feared that spill-over from the U.S. subprime debacle could still plunge the global economy into recession, despite unprecedented rescues of banking giants this week that slowed a free-fall on world markets.

Concern about a deepening slowdown wiped away optimism earlier this week that the worst of the crisis might be over, with global stock prices falling sharply anew and investors scurrying into safe havens such as gold.

"We are not at the end of the crisis. We are still living in dangerous times," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of 15 euro zone finance ministers said on arrival at an EU summit.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a rebuilding of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the keystone of global market regulation and said an early warning system was needed to detect potential future shocks to the global economy.

"I believe a forum to decide on big changes in the international economy can be held in the next few months," he told a news conference just before the two-day summit began.

He said he expected the Group of Eight industrialised nations -- the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia -- plus key emerging nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa to hold a summit on financial reform in November or December.

Germany's Angela Merkel also firmly backed the idea, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy has pushed as the fastest way of revamping international financial structures set up over 60 years ago at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference.