British Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted today that he gave banks too much freedom during his 10 years as Chancellor before 2007.
Banks should have been more tightly regulated in the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Brown said in a television interview with British broadcaster ITV.
Quizzed about mistakes he had made, Brown spoke of his regret in handling the banking sector during his time as Chancellor from 1997 until 2007.
'In the 1990s, the banks all came to us and said, 'Look, we don't want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation',' he told ITV in an interview due to be broadcast later today. 'All the complaints I was getting from people was, 'Look you're regulating them too much'. And actually the truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more'.
'So I've learnt from that. So you don't listen to the industry when they say, 'This is good for us'. You've got to talk about the whole public interest.'
Asked about other mistakes, Brown also cited his 2007 decision to scrap the lowest 10p income tax band - a move which helped spark a local election drubbing in 2008.
