WASHINGTON — World leaders agreed Saturday to put tighter controls on financial markets and work together to halt the economic crisis now cascading across the globe, but their summit was overshadowed by the knowledge that any long-term plan depended on someone who did not even attend: President-elect Barack Obama.
Gathering in Washington for the hastily arranged summit of the world's developed and developing countries, the leaders agreed to spur economic growth through increased government spending and other "stimulus"; expand the mission and resources of international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund; and create a "college" of international regulators to serve as an early warning system for global financial crises.
"We must lay the foundation for reform to help to ensure that a global crisis, such as this one, does not happen again," the leaders said in a joint statement.
Although the so-called G-20 summit took only the first small steps toward building a "new financial architecture" to protect the world from the kind of turmoil now wrenching markets from Hong Kong to London, President Bush defended the gathering as a good start.
"A meeting is not going to solve the world's problems," Bush said. "A meeting will help begin a process so that we can say over time that we will have a regulatory structure in place that will make this less likely to happen in the future."
Tellingly, most of the "action" in the leaders' five-page "plan of action" consisted of developing recommendations to approve at their next meeting, which they set for April 30. That's roughly 100 days after the inauguration of Obama, whose advisors met with foreign officials on the sidelines of the summit.
"The president-elect believes that the G-20 summit of leaders from the world's largest economies is an important opportunity to seek a coordinated response to the global financial crisis," Obama's representatives, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Republican Rep. Jim Leach, said in a statement.
Bush, at one of his final summits as president, took pains to indicate that the current and future administrations were working together.
"I told the leaders this, that President-elect Obama's transition team has been fully briefed on what we intended to do here at this meeting," Bush told reporters as the meeting wound up ahead of schedule less than 24 hours after it convened. "I told them that we will work tirelessly to make sure the transition between my administration and his administration is seamless."
