Obama, McCain advisers wary on world finance summit

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The role the next U.S. president-elect would play in a November international summit on reforming financial regulations is unclear, advisers for both White House candidates said on Tuesday.

European leaders have called for a revamp of the international financial architecture established after World War Two at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference -- a massive overhaul that may not win unqualified support in the Bush administration or its successor.

U.S. President George W. Bush said on Saturday he would host the first in a proposed series of global summits on the financial crisis as the world grapples with the biggest economic debacle since the Great Depression. The summit is set for soon after the November 4 U.S. presidential election.

The new president would not take office until January.

At an event in New York on Tuesday, Austan Goolsbee, who advises Democratic nominee Barack Obama, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who advises Republican John McCain, said they knew very little about the planned summit and were unsure what the role of the president-elect would be in such an event.

"I think to call it a Bretton Woods style thing is ultimately a completely misplaced analogy," Goolsbee said at the meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The goal of what we need to do right now is not about exchange rates, it's not about things of that nature. It's about setting up regulatory oversight and thinking of government interventions to prevent financial crisis from worsening. That's pretty different from Bretton Woods."

Holtz-Eakin said any participation by the president-elect "would be up to the president and the participants. It's not obvious what our role is."

Both advisers also said the best way for the United States to help other countries hit by the crisis was to clean up its own house and promote economic growth.

"At the broadest level, the most important thing the United States can do to help the world is stop the bleeding, and get the financial crisis stopped," Goolsbee said.

He said Obama had consistently argued for international coordination to avoid what he called "regulatory arbitrage," with financial markets taking advantage of different regulatory systems in different countries.

"The regulatory arbitrage of the last eight years has been rather extreme, so it's got to be done together," he said.

"Both as a matter of housekeeping and as a matter of international development, the U.S. has got to address this issue internally first," Goolsbee said.

"It's got to do that in a coordinated way because a lot of other countries are facing the same problems, and if everybody does it alone they can exacerbate the problems of their neighbors," he said. "But it's clear everybody has got to be mindful of watching their own home at this."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has advocated reforms including a regulatory forum to monitor risks in the financial system, tough new disclosure and due diligence rules and guidelines on executive pay.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and David Wiessler)