The world economy was in a tailspin and facing disaster to match the 1930s, but Brown had a plan which he had compared to the Bretton Woods agreement that shaped the world's postwar economic infrastructure.
"There are worrying signs that president Kim favours private providers – evidenced in his recent speech in which he endorsed the methods used by multinational Bridge International Academies, which caused over 100 organisations, including the Bretton Woods Project to sign a protest letter".
"I think we would respond cautiously [in] welcoming this funding if it is to be invested via governments in funding public education systems, but there is no detail of where the money is to be spent," said a spokeswoman for the Bretton Woods Project, a UK-based NGO.
For EMU, if and when it goes ahead, will have global economic implications.The creation of the euro will be the biggest change in the world's monetary arrangements since the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates broke down in the early 1970s.
The rich world's efforts to rebuild the gold standard after the first world war, and then again via Bretton Woods after the second both fell apart.
And it was true of the early postwar period, when a dominant and prosperous America found it in its interest to stand behind the Bretton Woods arrangement.It was not true, however, of the interwar years, when national commitments to the gold standard ultimately collapsed thanks to domestic political and economic pressures.
Controls were institutionalised in the post-war Bretton Woods agreement, to allow countries some monetary flexibility within a system of fixed exchange rates.
The Bretton Woods system unravelled in the 1970s, as countries were forced off unsustainable exchange rates.
And in the 1970s, when America no longer felt the need to give thriving Europe any extra advantage, domestic considerations led to a political decision to abandon Bretton Woods.The end of Bretton Woods led to a period of exchange-rate chaos.
The spectacular collapse of some fixed-rate regimes in the 1990s led to a brief surge in floating, but by the early 2000s that had given way to the regime known as "Bretton Woods 2".
The exchange-rate system agreed at Bretton Woods lasted only a generation.
