Good developments at the G-20
Sunday, September 27, 2009 at 1:13AM ARTICLE: Group of 20 Agrees on Far-Reaching Economic Plan, By EDMUND L. ANDREWS, New York Times, September 25, 2009
Pretty much as predicted:
The agreements, if carried out by national governments, would lead to much tighter regulation over financial institutions, complex financial instruments and executive pay. They could also lead to big changes and more outside scrutiny over the economic strategies of individual countries, including the United States.
Love that picture of the main table! Globalization's board of directors--indeed.
Confirming the essence of my analysis in last week's Esquire column:
The ideas are not new, and there is no enforcement mechanism to penalize countries if they stick to their old habits. But for the first time ever, each country agreed to submit its policies to a "peer review" from the other governments as well as to monitoring by the International Monetary Fund.
That in itself would be a big change, given how prickly national leaders have often been toward outside criticism of their policies. American officials, who pushed for the plan during weeks of negotiations before the summit meeting, argued that governments were so shocked by the economic crisis that they were willing to rethink what was in their self-interest.
"I'm quite impressed," said Eswar S. Prasad, an economist at Cornell University who had initially been skeptical about the proposed "framework" for stable growth. "A commitment by the U.S. to take the process seriously is a potential game-changer that would give the framework some credibility."
This is why I've long argued for the G-20 as the executive decision-making body of globalization, to include the clash of rules on interventions--kinetic or otherwise (see my WPR column tomorrow).
Reader Comments (3)
There is a good video by Ken Fisher on Youtube from the Commonwealth club of California. The video is over an hour long, but a pertinent clip is around 0:48:57 where he touches on the futility of increasing regulation to stop the "rats" that can drive these crises....but as a good financial advisor does, he mentions the least worst regulation of separating custodianship from the adviser in a simple manner. ie, your advisor can't have control over your money.
I think there's some of that, but primarily because Sarkozy likes being hard as a political differentiator--i.e., it makes him stick out.