Financial solutions light on details at summit

WASHINGTON — World leaders who gathered in Washington to tackle the global financial crisis agreed to a broad range of solutions Saturday but left the details until the spring.

The summit of the Group of 20, which represents 19 countries and the European Union, called for a range of new regulations of financial institutions, credit-rating agencies and other bodies widely blamed for sparking the gravest global economic crisis in decades.

Summit participants also demanded that large developing economies such as Brazil's and China's be given more say in the operation of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that many complain are dominated by the United States and other industrial nations.

Despite the event's hoopla, a joint declaration issued by the meeting's participants Saturday afternoon was heavy on generalities such as the need for more coordinated global action, financial transparency and tighter economic regulations. It gave leaders until the next summit, April 30, to fill in the blanks.

The declaration did list some more immediate priorities, such as creating a supervisory "college" for all major cross-border financial transactions and having each country launch a financial-sector assessment program that will inspect its regulatory system.

The overall message from the summit held at the National Building Museum in Washington was that an overly careless attitude toward financial risk and unregulated, newfangled financial instruments were the culprits behind the current economic turmoil.

President Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the summit a success while noting that coming up with lasting solutions to the broken global economy will take months, if not years.

For some, that could be too late.

The World Bank is projecting 1 percent global economic growth next year, with developed economies projected to contract by .1 percent. This past week, Germany became the latest country to enter into recession.

President-elect Obama did not attend but sent former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Leach to meet with leaders in his stead. Obama addressed the meeting obliquely Saturday in his first radio address as president-elect, expressing appreciation that Bush "has initiated this process, because our global economic crisis requires a coordinated global response."

Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said stimulating world trade would be key to climbing out of the economic quagmire, with both presidents calling for the conclusion of the long-stalled Doha Round of global trade talks, World Trade Organization sessions originally designed to reduce tariffs and ease trade.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev echoed other leaders in calling for a new financial "architecture" that would involve a more diverse range of economic players.

The summit showed off that increasingly diverse global economy, with countries such as Argentina and India and South Africa attending along with heavy hitters such as Germany and Japan.

Some experts said the summit's outcome was disappointing. "This is plain-vanilla stuff they could have agreed on without holding a meeting," said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. "What's new, except that this is the G-20 instead of the G-7?"

Information from The New York Times is included in this report.