G20 Summit Meets

Quoted text from Sky News.

"The leaders of the world's 20 major industrial and financial nation have vowed to reform the global financial systems - as a first step towards halting the worsening financial crises.

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown described it as "an historic agreement". But it is only a very fragile framework the leaders have agreed upon.

It has been left to their finance ministers to flesh out a general statement of principles before another summit in April and then another in the summer.

This emphasises how difficult the problem is and how long it is going to take to solve it.

Amongst the aims the summiteers pledged to achieve was a reform of the world's international institutions.

They include the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - both of which, it was agreed, needed to be revitalised and refinanced to meet the challenges of the global age.

The G20 also pledged more regulation and transparency of banks and finance houses, including cross border co-operation to monitor multi national banks.

A 'fresh look' at rules government market manipulation and fraud, was another proposed measure.

There was, apparently, not total agreement about how these aims should be achieved.

That will be left to the finance ministers and their officials to thrash out, starting immediately.

But the leaders did pledge to "lay the foundation for reform to help to ensure that a global crises, such as this one, does not happen again".

Outgoing US President George Bush declared that America could have gone into a downward economic spiral worse than the 1930s Great Depression without steps already taken by his government."

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• G20
• Summit
• Washington
• 15
• November
• 2008
• global
• economic
• meltdown
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