Audio: Bush to Meet European Leaders for Financial Crisis Talks

 

The meeting between the European and American leaders is taking place at Camp David, a bucolic retreat outside Washington. It comes just days after European leaders in Brussels agreed to work jointly to aid their ailing banks and fight against the world's worst financial crisis in decades.

At the Brussels summit, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the current European Union president, stressed the need for a coordinated EU response to the bloc's economic problems as well as its financial ones.

Sarkozy said European leaders wanted to defend savers and businesses that wanted to invest. Behind the financial crisis, he said, was a potential economic one.

But Sarkozy and other Europeans, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, want to go further. They talk about overhauling financial institutions and having a new version of the post World War II Bretton Woods conference that established a new monetary and financial system.

That is what they may be bringing to the table during talks with President Bush at Camp David.