AFP: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out on Monday at capitalism as a "false" economic system and called for the creation of a new global financial order.
ASTANA (AFP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out on Monday at capitalism as a "false" economic system and called for the creation of a new global financial order.
"I want to say that capitalist economics is false economics. Now they are trying to reform the system, the very system that caused the crisis," Ahmadinejad told reporters during a visit to Kazakhstan.
"We are interested in a new financial system based on justice. A real economic system."
In a fiery speech, the Iranian leader, speaking through a translator in Kazakhstan's capital Astana where he is on a state visit, blasted the world's main economic powers for burdening the world with their economic mistakes.
In a surprise move, Ahmadinejad became the first major world leader to back a plan put forward by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev last month to create a single world currency.
"It's a wonderful proposal. We consider it a good and correct idea. The world needs a single currency, a real currency."
Nazarbayev first called publicly for the creation of a new global currency, the "acmetal," in an article published in Russia's official daily Rossiskaya Gazeta in February.
At a conference in March, Nazarbayev argued the world required "an absolutely new global currency system."
His idea immediately won support from Robert Mundell, the Nobel prize-winning Canadian economist and a key intellectual architect of the euro currency, who said he was "right on track" with the scheme.
Ahmadinejad blamed Western immorality and shady financial instruments — he described their use as "selling paper" — for the global economic crisis.
"I want to say that this is a moral crisis and not a crisis of finances," the Iranian leader said.
