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A website forum in which senior fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics discuss and debate their responses to global economic and financial developments as they occur each day and offer insights that others might overlook.
The agreement to coordinate global economic strategies was one of the most impressive achievements by the G-20 in Pittsburgh and at the IMF meeting in Istanbul. But without credible agreements on currency policies, that project could turn out to be very vulnerable, or even a Trojan horse allowing politically stronger [...]
Strong advocates of our new G-20 process are convinced that it will bring legitimacy to international economic policy discussions, rule-making, and crisis interventions. Certainly, it’s better than the G-7/G-8 pretending to run things—after all, who elected them?
But who elected the G-20? The answer is: no one. And, [...]
It looks like the G-20 on Friday will emphasize its new “framework” for curing macroeconomic imbalances, rather than any substantive measures to regulate banks, derivatives, or any other primary cause of the 2008–2009 financial crisis.
This is appealing to the G-20 leaders because their call to “rebalance” global [...]
As we wade through a long line of international economic meetings—G-20 ministers of finance last week, G-20 heads of government in Pittsburgh coming up, IMF–World Bank governors meeting in Istanbul in early October (and all the associated “deputies” meetings, where the real work goes on)—it seems fair to ask: Where [...]
In less than three weeks, the G-20 leaders will meet in Pittsburgh for the third time in 10 months to discuss the global economic and financial crisis, prospects for recovery, and reforms of the global economic and financial system to limit the virulence of future crises. What do the leaders need to say to turn [...]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet with President Obama today, June 26, in Washington to deepen US-German cooperation on economic, security, and climate-change issues. An unfortunate quote of mine to a German paper from some months back has been trotted out in the press to exemplify informed American skepticism on the German governing coalition’s economic [...]
Many times, since I first used the phrase in 1989, the “Washington Consensus” has been proclaimed dead, most recently by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain at the press conference following the G-20 summit in London earlier this month. Yet most of the governments of the world seem to be determined to follow the precepts [...]
The Leaders’ statement from the London summit of April 2 is an improvement over the usual communiqués from international meetings by being much more concrete, readable, and substantial. It provides clear policy principles and specifies its agenda in sufficient detail.
For Central and Eastern Europe, this statement is likely to be particularly [...]
The G-20 summit meeting in London, which ended on Thursday (April 2), produced a good result. It is premature to call it “a new Bretton Woods,” or a “new global order,” or even “a turning point”—but the leaders did much better than was expected only two months ago and they delivered on [...]
Judged against the low expectations before the G-20 meeting, the outcome of the London summit meeting was not too bad. The G-20 communiqué signaled one clear and important achievement: beefing up the resources of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) substantially and by agreeing to issue $250 billion in new Special [...]