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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
On the face of it, the financial crisis of 2007-08 has helped rebalance the governance of global financial authorities, partially correcting the prior underrepresentation of emerging economies and of Asia in particular. From November 2008 to April 2009, when the G-7/G-8 was superseded by the G-20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was empowered and enlarged [...]
“I guess you guys have to be creative here,” US President Barack Obama was reported as exhorting German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Cannes Summit on November 4. This is an apt tagline for the current moment in the euro area crisis. The European Union needs to radically change its ways, or it may not [...]
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s days look numbered, following the loss of his governing majority in the Italian parliament. He has pledged to the Italian president to resign following the parliamentary passage of the 2012 budget expected later this month. This development is generally very good news. As negotiations in Athens head toward installation of a [...]
The drama surrounding Prime Minister George Papandreou’s proposal to hold a referendum on Greece’s acceptance of its bailout package, followed by his change of mind, has had the positive outcome he apparently intended. Though messy, his tactics have broadened the political support for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reform program in Greece. That much became [...]
As the G-20 traveling road-show heads to Cannes, the coinage of international summitry risks becoming utterly debased. Restoring relevance to these events requires an agenda that must meet three criteria. The issues must be important, they must be truly international, and there must be some realistic scope for getting agreement on them. At Cannes, only [...]
The first G-20 summits in 2008 and 2009 were dedicated to overhauling global financial regulation, empowering international financial authorities, and combating the economic downturn. Since then, progress has been uneven and priorities have shifted. The next summit in Cannes is set to be dominated by discussion of the policy chaos in Europe; financial regulatory matters [...]
The G-20 Agriculture Ministers met in Paris last June 22 and 23 to tackle the issue of food price volatility with the goal to improve food security. The Ministerial Declaration "Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture" is a 24-page document whose main objectives are: 1) improve agricultural production and productivity to respond to [...]
On September 25, the G-20 leaders, meeting in Pittsburgh, launched their "framework that lays out the policies and the way we act together to generate strong, sustainable and balanced global growth." The success of this effort will define the success (or failure) of the G-20 in the post-crisis period. Will the framework be regarded as [...]
Over the past year, the international financial community has revisited the complex issues raised by international capital flows and policies affecting them. Collective attention is appropriate because the flows, and actual or possible tightening of controls on them, create externalities for many countries. While not all of the attention to this topic over the past [...]
Just after the Lehman Brother collapse, financial regulatory reform was at the top of the global agenda, and it dominated the discussion at the first summit of G-20 leaders in November 2008. By contrast, it was little more than an afterthought in the last G-20 meeting in Paris last month. Many observers fret that the [...]