G20 nations edge towards agreement
Compared to the yawning gap that separated the parties only a few months ago, the EU, the UK and the Americans are converging on a consensus
an Traynor in Brussels
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 March 2009 09.47 BST
European leaders, led by Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, come to the crucial Docklands summit on Thursday believing they are winning or have won the argument about how to tackle casino capitalism.
The case pushed by Merkel repeatedly in recent weeks, and echoed by France and the European commission, is that there is no point now in more tax cuts and deficit spending to boost demand since it is not yet clear whether the huge fiscal stimuli packages already launched are actually going to work.
Rather, the Europeans argue, the focus should be on fixing a European and global system that is broke – through a new supervisory and regulatory regime. This option, Merkel declared at the weekend, offers the best chance of avoiding similar crises erupting once a decade, as has been the cycle since the 1980s.
"You are hugely mistaken if you think that this is just a storm and that we'll be back to the same old rules after a few difficult months," Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, said at the weekend.
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