Wish List

The developed democracies of the world have paired-off into two camps. Hopefully, all can agree on the evils of protectionism and crowd-pleasing clamp-downs on tax havens. But at the moment, the Europeans are focusing on regulation and resisting calls for further stimulus, while the Americans and Japanese are pushing for renewed global government spending and holding out a beefed-up IMF (which would help among others struggling economies in central and eastern Europe) as the reward. We could get all this if we're lucky, or we could get nothing but vague promises of future frameworks. The London Summit is less than three weeks away.