Word: summits
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...pleasantly surprised—this is not the column I planned on running today. The days leading up to yesterday’s G-20 London Summit showed all the signs of hubris-hampered, every-economic-bloc-for-itself nasty diplomatic failure. It turned out better than expected: Although many worthwhile bottom-up institutional reforms didn’t squeeze through, the six-pronged plan for global recovery proposed by the leaders of the world’s 19 largest economies, plus the European Union, offers at least a small sign of hope...
...from the feet up.” Smooth teamwork is not the style of diplomacy the world is used to seeing at these meetings. After all, we’ve come to expect deadlock on the most important issues. The last G-20 summit ended with nothing but an agreement to meet again, and the Doha round of international trade talks was a joke...
...years, as the global political landscape has shifted beneath our feet, the emerging economies have found a voice, and American hegemony has receded into a form of influential leadership rather than outright dominance. Decision-making at the global level has been relatively non-existent. Although yesterday’s summit registered no seismic shift toward solidarity and probably nowhere near the number of institutional reforms needed to solve long-term problems, it at least made a strong tremor of cooperation on the geopolitical Richter scale...
...establish, mainly due to the growing influence of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which are starting to throw a little weight around (though substantially less in Russia’s case). The heydays of the Group of 8 are over, and almost everything proposed at the summit had to get past the emerging economies. Case in point: When Sarkozy proposed a global crackdown on tax-heavens, it was Chinese, not American, opposition that cut down the proposal substantially so it could protect financial centers in Hong Kong and Macao...
...have no doubt that Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz will sober up my analysis of the summit in the next few days. But, for now, I’m chalking up this one as a small win and my “animal spirits,” to quote John Maynard Keynes, are high. A little more confidence in collaboration is a nice thing to have, and confidence, after all, is what recovery is made...