Print

G7 won't cut it

Catherine Deshayes

Finance ministers of the world's Group of Seven industrial nations meeting in Washington cannot alleviate the global economic crisis alone even if they agree a joint proposal, it is claimed...

As the politicians from the UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy gather in the US capital city key two key international finance organisations are calling for other giants like Russia and China to be included.

The International Monetary Fund, the world's leading finance advisory body to Governments, is warning that economies outside the G7 need to be included in a global rescue plan.

'The G7 has already done a lot. Consultation discussions during the last year have been very useful but we need to go beyond the G7,' said IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

He even went as far to suggest that it is not just a matter of consulting countries outside the G7 but of actually including them. 'There are other countries which are obviously major players in the world economy. We need to look to the extension of the G7 to G11 or G12,' he said.

'In any case you have 160 countries which will remain outside and most of them, if not all of them, have a role to play. This is now a crisis which concerns everybody on earth and we need the co-operation, the discussion, and the opinion of what other countries may say.

The view is backed by the World Bank. 'The G7 is not working. We need a better group for a different time. It should be expanded to include the top 14 global economies to tackle development issues as well as the financial turmoil plaguing richer nations,' said World Bank President Robert Zoellick.

Source: www.propertywire.com

The outcome: Germany, France, Italy and a further 12 European countries unveiled a "comprehensive" plan for salvaging their banking systems from potential ruin, as panicked European leaders met to try to ward off more financial meltdown before the markets reopen today.

An emergency summit in Paris of the 15 countries using the euro single currency was encouraged by Gordon Brown to adopt the rescue plan he launched last week as the template for an increasingly global approach to the financial crisis.

Yesterday's summit in Paris followed a frenetic weekend of activity in Washington, in which the IMF, the World Bank, the G7 club of rich western nations and the broader G20 group, all called for urgent and coordinated action.

Source: The Guardian