Director-General Pascal Lamy, in a speech before the International Trade Commission of the European Parliament in Brussels on 17 October 2006, said the failure of the trade talks would not be a major economic shock that would precipitate any particular market crisis, but rather as a slowly developing disease that would progressively sap the strength of the multilateral trading system built up over the past 50 years, damaging its economic lungs, its political heart, and its systemic bone structure .
