What Didn’t Get Done, or Said, at the G-20 Summit

Ted Bromund / April 06, 2009

Unraveling the meaning of the G-20 summit will be the work of months, if not years. Many of the announced measures are vague, and the ones that are less vague are not encouraging. The promise to continue “expansionary policies for as long as needed” is an open-ended invitation to tax, borrow, and spend, while the pledge to “support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms” is foolhardy. The responsibility of firms is to obey the law and make profits for their shareholders, not to be subject to the vague, arbitrary, politically-motivated dictates of ‘social responsibility.’

But there is another side to the G-20 summit: what did not get done, or said. This was supposedly a summit held in response to the world financial crisis. Yet many of the measures – whether sensible or not – were about preventing another crisis in the future, not about dealing with the current one. This makes as much sense as the captain and the first mate of the Titanic discussing the principles behind iceberg-resistant hulls as they sink into the North Atlantic. (more…)