Netanyahu: Better policies needed to protect against financial crisis

By JPOST.COM STAFF
Israel can protect itself from the US financial crisis which is shaking the global economy, and - by employing a few simple changes - can come out of it with economic growth, Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday. "I think that we can get out of this crisis, and be strengthened if we act properly," Netanyahu said during an interview with Channel 2. "If we don't act properly, then the waves of this tsunami will also wash away some of what we have here." Netanyahu said that the central problem with the crisis in the US stemmed from "loan after loan which was granted to people who had no coverage." "One of the things which I started to work on before I left the government was an organization of the supervision here, which, unfortunately, has not progressed," he said, adding that "When we [Likud] return to the leadership of the country, as I hope we will, that is one of the things which I will do." "It is not enough," he continued. "The Bank of Israel I assume is doing continuous work and checking the exposure and obligations of our banks, the financial institutions, and if need be, prepare a security net," Netanyahu said, adding that doing so was reasonable and necessary, but also not enough. "The second thing is to do what we did five years ago, when we were in a very serious financial crisis," he continued. "What we did was develop very quickly policies of growth." "We need to lower taxes in order to motivate growth," he said.