IN WASHINGTON YESTERDAY, President George Bush offered his own version of Gordon Brown's "global solutions for a global problem". Speaking specifically about the G7 group of nations, but with a message intended for a wider global audience, Bush said that nations could not afford to contradict or undermine each other as they sought to work out a global masterplan that would return markets to stability.

In an interconnected world, he said, "no nation will gain by driving down the fortunes of another. We are in this together." For a president who ignored the will of the United Nations five years ago and dragged the United States and a willing UK government into war in Iraq, there is irony in this plea.

So if we are to avoid the mistakes of the Great Depression in 1930s when state shutters came down in a global display of damaging protectionism, what do Brown and Bush really mean by calling for a "global solution"? Do they mean creating an organisation, funded by those countries whose banks and stock markets have been hit in the credit crisis, that would oversee global financial systems, offer financial and co-ordinated assistance and be a lender of last resort?

Such an organisation already exists, set up in 1944 to oversee a world economy recovering from a world at war. It is called the International Monetary Fund. The IMF are meeting with the World Bank today, and they no more have the answer to what is now required than the G7 do. What Brown may want is an agreed restructuring of how the world's inter-connected banking systems work.

But what has been happening over the last weeks are moves not to create a new global system, but to fix the old one. If Brown and Bush succeed in getting the US and the UK's banking systems functioning again, it could be enough to instil confidence in world markets. Yes, there is a global problem, but it was Bush whose attention was elsewhere, and who let an unregulated financial system create the sub-prime chaos in America.

And in the UK, using Brown's own description, it was he as Britain's chancellor who was at the helm of a decade of "irresponsibility".

Although the creation of a new IMF is unlikely, a new form of global co-operation is an achievable and worthy goal. Instead Brown and Bush have found a convenient message, with Brown bestriding the world stage as a statesman with a mission, a remarkable change for a leader who, until a month ago, was under seige.

Brown has suddenly found that global blame, and a call for global solutions, works.