The London Summit
Alex Evans at Global Dashboard is reporting on the current state of negotiations at the summit and all-round good egg Adam Groves interviews Mr Billy Bragg in the City of London. While just about every respectable politician in the world is sounding off about the importance of avoiding protectionism (with their fingers crossed), a contrarian Noreena Hertz in The Times calls for protectionism. Though, on that note, prospects for Doha are predictably bleak.
The crisis and the developing world
Jeremy Seabrook thinks Gandhi had the right idea (he really didn’t).The FT has a nice supplement on the the financial crisis in Africa and the UK is boosting foreign aid (a bit).
Global governance
There’s some big academic thinking from Saskia Sassen at oD about a world economy powered by finance. Stiglitz et al. at the UN are arguing for the G20 to be replaced by a Global Economic Council, while the Sec-Gen is afraid of total meltdown. On the subject of disaster, we should apparently be expecting a ‘”perfect storm” of food energy and water shortages’ sometime before 2030. More broadly, Timothy Garton Ash highlights the G2 (US and China) in the light of the EU’s failure to work cohesively. The New Statesman, on similar lines, believes that ‘no-one rules the world’ and CEPR welcomes us to a truly multi-polar state of affairs.
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