Triumph for the president

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It worked. Our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in global activity and stabilize financial markets.

The G20 conference in Pittsburgh was the scene of several big wins for President Barack Obama, hosting his first international summit. Since his historic election last year, he has pushed for change in global finances to recognize the increasing economic clout of China and other emerging powerhouses.

The agreement to overhaul the IMF's voting structure is especially satisfying for the Obama administration, since the president proposed the 5 percentage point shift.

However, a sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency. Reforming compensation policies and practices is an essential part of our effort to increase financial stability. It's entirely appropriate to focus on strengthening the connection between employee pay and long-term incentives.

If we all act together, financial institutions will have stricter rules for risk taking, governance that aligns compensation with long-term performance, and greater transparency in their operations.

The G20 countries, which account for 90 percent of the world's output, vowed to keep emergency economic supports in place until a recovery was secured. Leaders endorsed an agreement on phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels to help combat global warming.

We are going to have two G20 meetings next year, in Canada and in Korea.

 

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pull your nose out of his ass

 

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pull your nose out of his ass

Pull your head out of yours.

 

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Pull your head out of yours.

fail

 

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Growing economic stability, stronger financial regulation, commitment to climate change and commonsense regulation of bankers' bonuses are all good for the world community, and hence good for America.

The US can't, should not and won't continue to experience consumption-led growth driving very high volumes of imports and lending impulse to the rest of the world economy.

That's not a sustainable financial situation for the US, and that's why we're in the process of adjusting.

Strong agreements from today's G20 Summit will secure economic recovery and deliver a global plan for jobs and sustained growth.

 

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While issuing the lofty vows, the leaders failed to define how to accomplish many of them and were quickly back to bickering over details.

lol....great triumph barry...

and some of these pledges were from when BUSH was in office....if obama offered dnc the moon, dnc would proclaim him the greatestesttes ever president

 

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Acting in unison to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis, world leaders pledged Friday to undertake an ambitious and coordinated effort to overhaul banking practices and build a new global economic model.

The plan, unveiled at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit here, would set constraints on executive pay at financial firms, impose tougher standards on banks and launch a process aimed at correcting economic imbalances, such as China's large trade surpluses and the United States' huge deficits.

The agreement is short on specific targets and dates, and analysts described some aspects as plainly utopian. But others said the action plan was a good starting point and, if followed through and properly enforced, could bring a significant change that would help avert the kind of deep financial crisis from which the world is now only emerging.

"We laid the groundwork today for long-term prosperity," President Obama said at a news conference at the conclusion of the summit. "Because our global economy is now fundamentally interconnected, we need to act together to make sure the recovery creates new jobs and industries while preventing the kind of imbalances and abuses that led us into this crisis."

Achieving one of his key objectives for the meeting, Obama won the support of the G-20 nations for a U.S. proposal dubbed a "Framework for Sustainable and Balanced Growth," which is intended to rectify distortions in the global economy.

Those imbalances have been caused in large part by the heavy spending by Americans that has made the U.S. the dominant market for the goods of many other countries. But after suffering the worst recession in decades, U.S. consumers have sharply increased their savings and cut back on spending, a trend that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner called a "fundamental shift."

He and other Obama administration officials said other countries must now recognize the new reality and change their policies to stimulate greater spending by their own people.

The G-20 statement Friday did not name any perpetrators, but China, which has been running a huge trade surplus with the U.S. and most of the world, is a major target. Beijing already has taken steps to boost domestic demand, but the sustainable-growth framework seeks to establish an ongoing process that would assess the effect of national policies on the global economy.

The accord calls for a kind of peer review in which G-20 member countries, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, would examine one another's economic policies. But many analysts said the plan lacked an enforcement mechanism and would have little force in correcting global imbalances.

"Any such kind of agreement will be difficult to be worth the paper it's written on," said Razeen Sally, co-director of the European Center for International Political Economy in Brussels.

In selling the framework proposal to China, the U.S. pressed the G-20 to address another imbalance -- the representation of major fast-growing countries in important global economic functions.

On Friday, Obama and other world leaders said the G-20 would supplant the Western-dominated Group of 8 as the "premier forum" for international economic cooperation.

"I think it's a big plus," said Barry Bosworth, an international economics expert at the Brookings Institution. "We cannot have a global economy controlled by a monopoly. It's a recognition of the growing importance of Asia."

The G-8 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the U.S. The G-20 adds Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey. The European Union is represented in both.

The G-20 also adopted a U.S.-led effort to enhance the voting power of emerging economies, primarily China, at the IMF. But Bosworth called the agreement to shift at least 5% of the votes on the agency's board to developing countries a "trivial reweighting." The change comes at the expense of Europe without affecting the U.S., which maintains its veto power in the IMF.

On executive pay, the G-20 leaders endorsed standards to tie compensation to long-term performance, increase disclosure and limit bonuses by linking them to revenue. The goal is to discourage the kind of excessive risk-taking that many say was the prime culprit in the financial crisis.

Although the pay measures would be carried out by each country, the G-20 leaders called on the Financial Stability Board, a group of finance ministers and central bankers, to monitor implementation.

European leaders had pressed for pay caps, but the idea was resisted by the U.S. and was never on the negotiating table, officials said.

To strengthen the financial system, the G-20 leaders also agreed that it was necessary to raise the amount and quality of capital that banks must keep on their balance sheets to cushion against future losses.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-g20-obama26-2009sep26,0,5752091.story