Excerpts from an editorial in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
Whether yesterday’s economic summit in Washington takes its place in history remains to be seen. World leaders have got together too many times over the years, made grand declarations, posed for photographers and then done nothing. This time the stakes are higher. The governor of the Bank of England says we are still not through the most serious banking crisis since the outbreak of World War I.
The Washington gathering labored under a huge disadvantage. It was Hamlet without the prince. The most powerful man in the world was 600 miles away in Chicago, having a day off with his family. While every one of the G-20 leaders would have loved to have been seen with Barack Obama, none more so than Gordon Brown, he chose to stay away.
George Bush and Hank Paulson, his beleaguered treasury secretary, will not be around to preside over building a new global financial architecture. The big decisions will have to wait until after Jan. 20, Obama’s inauguration, although progress on restarting the Doha round of trade talks, an important ingredient of future prosperity and a bulwark against protectionism, was made.
In a sense, the summit had a simple task. On a recent visit to the London School of Economics, the British queen put it neatly. “If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them?” she asked. Making sure we do not miss future episodes where risk-taking by banks gets out of hand is a priority. Achieving it — even after the G-20 leaders unveiled what Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, described as an action plan — is easier said than done.
