French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who first called for the 20-nation economic conference, defended the summit from criticism that it accomplished little.
"Mind-sets have changed," Sarkozy said at a news conference afterward. "We've used this crisis to say that you must do something, and fast. And that was by no means a foregone conclusion when we arrived here."
But the outcome was far from the kind of sweeping "Bretton Woods II" summit that Sarkozy originally envisaged to remake global institutions in the wake of the most damaging financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Sarkozy said that comparisons to Bretton Woods, the 1944 conference in New Hampshire that established a system of rules, institutions like the IMF and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, are overdrawn.
"This cannot be sorted out in a matter of three weeks," Sarkozy said, referring to how long it took Bush to convene the G-20. "Bretton Woods took two years."
The G-20 summit was a kind of economic coming-out party for large developing countries, including China, India, Brazil and Russia.
"There's no sense in making political and economic decisions without the G-20 countries," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told reporters in Washington. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said organizations such as the G-8 "are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the day."
Because of these countries' higher growth rates and large central bank reserves, the developed world may not be able to ease the crisis without their help.
These countries, however, have expressed some vexation over the role they are being urged to play, especially given that the crisis began in the United States. Russia has accused the United States of poor market oversight.
"Our joint opposition to the financial crisis will only be effective if we find a common understanding of the causes and the mechanisms that caused this crisis," said Arkady Dvorkovich, chief economic advisor to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. During the summit, "President Medvedev noted that the contemporary structures which regulate economic security and stability are not adequate, and we need new ideas and institutions adequate to the challenges we face now."
In deference to that view, the joint statement criticized regulation in "advanced countries," saying that regulators "did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets, keep pace with financial innovation, to take into account the systemic ramifications of domestic regulatory actions."
