G20 Summit – Leaders are Divided
Leaders are meeting, for the first time in an Asian country, for the G20 summit today but are finding it difficult to reach any sort of agreement.
Arriving in Seoul on Thursday President Obama finds splits over currency and trade policies that will be difficult to breach.
The G20 consists of vastly different nations with many different priorities but is becoming increasingly important after the recent shift in global power away from the traditional areas of North America and Europe.
One of the main priorities of Obama is to get China to allow it’s currency to rise in value and on the other side of the table China are annoyed that the US has pumped billions of dollars in to their economy which has effectively devalued the dollar.
So far even an agenda is causing problems let alone any policies. They plan to issue a statement on Friday but it looks like that is going to be a difficult to be able to do anything other than a blank statement that really doesn’t mean anything & has no long standing effect.
For most of the European countries at the forefront of their minds are their massive deficits that their governments and economies have run up.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has consistently said that Countries that have large deficits have a responsibility to deal with them. He said
“The alternative isn’t some wonderland of continuous growth, the alternative is the markets questioning your economy, it’s your interest rates rising, it’s confidence falling and you see your economy go into the danger zone that others are in.”
Some of the other countries present have the opposite perspective, Brazil’s president said
“If the rich countries are not consuming and want to grow its economy on exports, the world goes bankrupt because there would be no one to buy,” he told reporters. “Everybody would like to sell.”
So the next few days it will be interesting to see what proposals and solid action plans come out of the summit, if any at all.
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