At Global Finance Talks, 20 Different Agendas

At Global Finance Talks, 20 Different Agendas

With 20 world leaders in town for 24 hours, there wasn’t much time for grand gestures or bold promises at Saturday’s summit meeting on the global financial crisis. But that did not stop the leaders from bringing 20 different agendas, some more ambitious than others.

Besides Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush were the leaders from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey.

To help countries hurt by the crisis, Mr. Brown is pushing for the resources of the International Monetary Fund to be expanded. The fund, he said, should function like an “international central bank.”

The trouble with this idea is that there are only a handful of candidates with enough cash to pour money into the I.M.F. — China, Japan, and oil producers like Saudi Arabia...To persuade these countries to increase their contributions would require giving them a larger role in the governance of the fund. And that would mean reducing the influence of Britain and other European countries.

For the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva...he has been outspoken about how developing countries are victims of a crisis not of their own making.

“No country is safe,” Mr. da Silva said last weekend, opening a preparatory meeting of finance ministers in São Paulo. “They are all being infected by problems that originated in the advanced countries.”

November 15, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/washington/16leaders.html?ref=world