Gordon Brown said today that the recession now gripping Britain was unlike any others since the Great Depression, caused not by domestic economic mismanagement but by a "complete market failure" set off by the sub-prime crisis in the United States.
As statisticians confirmed the UK's first recession since 1991 and the largest quarterly contraction in 28 years, Mr Brown - who spent ten years as Chancellor under Tony Blair before taking over as Prime Minister - said co-ordinated international action would be the key to lifing the global economy quickly out of the downturn.
And he insisted that he and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, had had no choice but to commit billions of pounds of public money to shoring up the banking system because the "cost of inaction" would have been much greater.
"Every recession in the last 60 years in Britain has been caused by inflation, domestically generated, caused by wages getting out of control on some occasions, by interest rates having to rise," Mr Brown told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
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