Pascal Lamy

Three of them have been socialists.

Renato Ruggiero of the Italian Socialist Party, Mike Moore of the New Zealand Labor Party, and Pascal Lamy of the French Socialist Party.

In addition, Lamy's predecessor, Supachai Panichpakdi.

Supachai Panichpakdi.

financial crisis...

There were a whole bunch of us who convened in Geneva for a meeting with the then head of the World Trade Organization, the WTO, who's Pascal Lamy.

And I remember the room being quite tense.

All the sort of major banks, trade finance banks in the world were there, a number of export credit agencies and some of the multilateral development banks talking about how many of the major financial institutions supporting trade in the world were bankrupt, and how there was a huge drop in global trade, and how we were going to try to work our way out of this mess.

I've told this story about seven hundred and sixty-five times.

I had to sit in a television studio with Pascal Lamy.

Yeah.

Of course.

Oh, did you? Oh, I'm gonna tell it again because it, I mean, it could not highlight your point more perfectly, that single moment in my life, could it? Seriously.

You're talking about stupid.

Pascal Lamy, the former director general of the World Trade Organization, and I am interviewing him and somebody else in a television studio about what it would actually mean to, in Clement's words, and the words that were very popular at the time, "Go WTO," right? What would that actually mean? I know.

Let's ask the former director general of the World Trade Organization.