PM: We should have acted decade ago

In an interview with The Guardian, he suggested that he could have pushed for concerted international reform in the aftermath of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s.

His comments are the closest that he has come to accepting a measure of responsibility for the current crisis - although they stop far short of the full apology that his critics have been demanding.

"I take full responsibility for all my actions, but I think we're dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national," he said.

"Perhaps 10 years ago after the Asian crisis when other countries thought these problems would go away, we should have been tougher ... keeping and forcing these issues on to the agenda like we did on debt relief and other issues of international policy."

His concession came after Tory leader David Cameron last week said "sorry" for his party's failure to foresee the looming banking crisis - a move seen as an attempt to increase the pressure on Mr Brown to offer a similar apology.

Despite the Conservatives' continuing double-digit lead in the opinion polls, Mr Brown insisted the current situation should favour Labour, as "only progressive, centre-left governments can address the problems of the global change".

He said that the "40-year-old prevalent orthodoxy" known as the "Washington consensus" in favour of free markets had come to an end.

Mr Brown was also said to have refused to rule out a further "fiscal stimulus" for the British economy when Chancellor Alistair Darling delivers his Budget on April 22.

The paper also reported that ministers had now accepted that the planned spending review this summer was now unlikely to go ahead, in part because the economic outlook is so unstable it is difficult to make meaningful three-year departmental spending forecasts.