G20: Veni, vidi... vinci? (Updated, again)

London was calling. The G20 arrived, saw it and... Well, about the winning, not so much. It was an easy forecast. London summit hasn’t solved anything. To be fair, it wasn’t meant to anyway. Is not a lot what you can achieve in just one day. Only -maybe- set up the rules for an economic recovery. And that, we will see if so.

Who has been seen -and heard- high, clearly and loudly have been the protesters who invaded London during the two days of the summit. “Remember, remember; the Fifth of November”. Like in Guy Fawkes’ day, like in “V for vendetta”. If someone achieved their goal filling up frontpages in the newspapers, they were the ones. With the invaluable help -some say- from the City police.

About the financial breackdown, not a lot. The Chinese arrived in the summit asking for more decision power in the IMF (without increasing their contribution) and a global currency. None of that had an echo on the rest of the participants. They also were demanding more aid to the Third World countries, specially those in Africa (where their flow of business increases exponentially every year). Here they got a negative and a reprimand from both the Africans, but also from the G20 leaders.

On the French-German side, Sarkozy and Merkel won the petition asking for a tighter supervision of the high risk inversion funds, the hedge funds. On the other side, they got (initially) no favorable response for a list of tax havens, but at least from now on they will have to be more transparent. It doesn’t seem like a difficult task. The difficult would have been to push them into being less transparent, that could have been fun.

Neither Obama -and Japan, and in a lesser way, Britain- got his demands fully accomplished. No global bailouts.

The IMF, on the other hand, will have a great portion of the cake. To be exacts, more than a trillion dollars. Half of it will be for the IMF itself, $250 billons would go into special funds like the ones that already supplied Iceland and Bulgary with money to bailout their countries. The rest of it, will go to ease the markets and trade. Oh, and a small consolation prize for Obama and Brown: another $5 tr. to spend until the end of 2010 in stimulus plans. Don’t say there is no money in the bank.

But however, the main comments were around the photos in the summit. First about the First Dames’ photo. It was almost impossible to make a complete photo with all of them. Of course, there were a few absences before starting. The star of the crew, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, didn’t travel to London. Neither did the husbands of Angela Merkel or Cristina Fernandez de Kirtchner. And Sonsoles Espinosa (Spanish First Dame) didn’t appeared for the photos.

Then was the turn for the protagonists of the summit. Three times had to be shot the official photo until it came as it should. First, Canadian Prime Minister was missing. Then, it was Berlusconi the one missed. Finally, at the end of the afternoon, it could be made.

But back to the economics, let’s be optimistic. Maybe this is not “the day that the world came together, to fight back against the global recession” with “a plan” and a “clear timetable”, as Gordon Brown said. That is what the Premier wanted it to be and he couldn’t have. But at least, the basis for the new financial and economic rules are settle. Now, it is time to develop them.

Oh, and the Europeans finally made it to the photo with Obama. That’s important too.

What each one wanted and what they got.


Photo: The Guardian

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Update: There is already a "black list" of tax havens, made by the OCDE and shown via the WSJ. The habitual suspects like Andorra or the Cayman Islands appear on it. There is as well a "grey list" (Other financial centers) with Switzerland, Belgium and others on it.

Update 2: Berlusconi couldn’t make it to the photo group at first, but he got at the end another one much more interesting.


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