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World leaders urge us to spend
Feb 1 2009 by Roger Domeneghetti, Sunday Sun
GLOBAL leaders had a simple message for the world today: Keep trading.
If nations instead choose to barricade their economies behind new commercial barriers, they risk making the global economic crisis even worse, leaders said.
“Trade is the best economic stimulus,” said Doris Leuthard, the Swiss economics minister who hosted trade chiefs from the world’s most powerful countries on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
Their talks, however, offered no renewed hopes for a long-awaited deal in the Doha round of trade talks that many see as a necessary bulwark against the threat of economic protectionism, which devastated the world during the Great Depression.
The meeting did not produce a timeframe for action in the Doha talks, now in their eighth year with no completion in sight.
Hundreds of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization protesters in Geneva violently rebutted the free trade argument, lobbing bottles at riot police, who responded with tear gas and water cannons.
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