Calls grow for global strategy

WASHINGTON — The way the current financial crisis spread around the world like a brush fire, outracing all efforts to contain it, underscored a painful reality: We have a global economy but nothing close to a global system for managing it. The world may be flat when it comes to the increasingly interconnected economies of the 21st century, but it still has borders -- and conflicting national interests to go with them.

Now, as senior economic policymakers from the major developed nations meet here today, the question is whether the worst economic crisis since before World War II will open the door for a comprehensive, unified economic strategy.

U.S. officials have been careful not to raise expectations for the so-called Group of 7 meeting, which brings together the top financial officials of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the U.S.

"We have very different countries, economies of different sizes, financial systems with different needs," Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson said this week. "You're going to have different policies."

But pressure is building for that to change -- both in response to this crisis and to head off potential crises in the future. The head of the International Monetary Fund warned Thursday that governments must act "quickly, forcefully and cooperatively" to prevent a global recession.

"There's no domestic solution to crises like this one," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said. "All kinds of cooperation has to be commended. All lonely acts have to be avoided if not condemned."

Finance ministers attending the G-7 meeting will confront the fact that the response to the global crisis thus far has reflected the differing approaches to the crisis taken by U.S. policymakers and many of their counterparts abroad.

As the problems that began with the subprime mortgage debacle have grown steadily worse, Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke have thrown out the old playbook, devising one dramatic new program after another and committing billions of tax dollars aimed at reviving the economy.

In what would be the most dramatic move yet, the U.S. is considering backing billions of dollars in bank debt and temporarily insuring all U.S. bank deposits, the Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday on its website.

Overseas, however, most central bankers have hesitated to take joint action beyond the sphere of setting interest rates. Where joint action beyond that has occurred, it usually has been ad hoc, not part of a comprehensive global strategy.