G20 Meeting On Financial Crisis A Failure

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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AngrybearA little less conversation a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark…Elvis Presley

The G20 financial summit did not yield much of any significance that could help staunch the bleeding brought on by the worldwide economic crisis.

Among the modest and and ill-defined suggestions from the meeting, members "urged governments to implement "appropriate" fiscal and monetary policies to shore up sagging economies, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The meeting lasted less than six hours.

The document issued by the members suggested more oversight of hedge funds, more transparency for trading in the global default swaps market, and greater supervision of credit rating agencies. All of these steps have been urged by central banks and economists for months. In other words, there was nothing new here and the proposals had no teeth. For the entire text of the summit declaration check here.

The document also called for a "colleges of supervisors" will be set up to monitor the world’s biggest financial institutions.

The G20 plans another meeting for April 2009. The world ought to be in the grips of the worst recession in seven decades by then, and it will be too late for governments to do much about it.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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