A Rare Triumph of Substance at the Summit

By Steven Pearlstein
WashPost
Friday, April 3, 2009

International economic summits deserve to be regarded with skepticism: The most important decision to come out of them is usually the call for yet another meeting.

But yesterday's G-20 meeting in London was an exception. While President Obama may have overstated things a bit when he declared it a "turning point" for the now-shrinking global economy, the meeting did manage to boost the confidence of financial markets, inject another trillion dollars into the financial system and provide needed political cover for world leaders to take unpopular actions back home.

Ever since this round of G-20 consultations was launched last year by an insistent President Nicolas Sarkozy, there's been a distinctly French accent to the process. Implicit in the agenda has been a critique of the Anglo-American economic model that, in the European imagination, was the root cause of the current economic crisis. Sarkozy's aim was nothing less than a rewrite of the rules for global capitalism to conform to the more civilized norms of the continental European model.

At the same time, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was keen on creating a new global financial architecture to replace the creaky Bretton Woods financial institutions that failed to prevent a series of international financial crises and now seem oddly out of sync with the global economy.

(More here.)