Not that other countries have a position paper ready to dish out, but most of them have their stances clear. Between November 15 when the Washington Declaration was signed and today with the London Summit just 48 hours away, the positions — and the divides — are fairly clear. Read more

I hate to say ‘I told you so’, but I told you so — I really did.

Coming to a global congregation of the world’s largest economies and hoping 18 members to blindly follow what the US dictates and the UK furthers was nothing short of a foolish expectation. High on intent, reason and morals but low on humility, persuasion and mutual respect, the audacious spend-your-way-out-of-the-crisis proposal, born in the USA, grown in the UK and parroted by IMF, was destined to die. Read more

Finally, the single most important reason why G20 must solve the ongoing credit crisis: children.

BBC has an excellent story on how the crisis is affecting children in three schools in Glasgow, Islamabad and Mbabane. Read more

The undercurrents at G20 just got public and the London Summit just got racist. Standing next to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva brought the black-brown-white frustrations on the global finance table.  Read more

A March 20, 2009 paper from Yale has tips for Obama to negotiate this crisis. Written by Michael S. Solender, a senior research scholar and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, How the Obama Administration Should Regulate the Financial Sector puts forth five key attributes that US regulators should have. These are:  Read more

Surprising for a superpower that still believes it leads a unipolar world, US President Barack Obama’s March 24, 2009 op-ed published in 31 newspapers was free of arrogance. Whether that’s a recognition of the emergence of a multi-polar world a quarter of a century down the road or whether that’s a true spirit of cooperation that Obama hopes to usher in following the country’s Bush-led isolation, we will know some day. Read more

Speaking only of official recommendations — that is, suggestions made by governments or regulators of G20 and not think tanks or economists — I have with me a master list that has crossed a century. Taking the 126 page The Turner Review, published by UK’s Financial Services Authority on March 18, 2009, which adds 32 of its own (listed at the bottom of this post), the total number of sovereign suggestions stands at 101 — and counting. Here’s the timeline.  Read more

Today, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pressed for a greater role of China in International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a prelude to the G20 meeting on April 2. With this, the first step in reforming this multilateral institution has been taken. That step is to give a greater voice to borrower countries that are poorer than the wealthy nations that lend to the bank. Read more

If you’ve been visiting my blog over the past week, when it turned daily, you would broadly know the issues confronting the heads of the 20 most powerful nations on earth today — how to get their economies going. That is, how to get banks to lend, industry to invest and households to buy, well, houses. So complex has the debate around resolving this global financial crisis (the first for this generation), so vested the interests (of countries, of bankers, of companies) and so wide and deep the consequences (from the US and Europe through Asia to Africa), that it has moved from global boardrooms to our bedrooms. Read more

For those looking at a sneak preview of what’s to come in the London Summit of G20 on April 2, breakingviews.com has a leak.

“The G20 blueprint programme, a copy of which has been obtained by breakingviews.com, is largely a statement of principles,” said Hugo Dixon, the website’s editor in chief and chairman. “The scheme will have to be blessed when the leaders meet in April. Detailed numbers and regulatory mechanisms will then need to be worked out in the coming months.” Read more