World leaders find LUV for new world order

The buzzword here is interconnected, but differentiated. While all the blocs are aware that they are interlinked in a way that the global recession proved, they aren’t all in the same boat, or even in the same ocean. For instance, a key theme was the great shift East of global power, and ‘rebalancing’ the global economy — mainly pushing China to revalue its currency, and the prevalent Western view that China’s high savings rate and huge reserves were a key driver for the global crisis — a point the French President Nicolas Sarkozy hammered home.

China, and India, and Thailand, to name a few, made it abundantly clear that these economies have enough internal regional and demographic ‘rebalancing’ to do first, thank you, to go around saving the rest of the world. Kamal Nath and Cheng Siwei, chief of China’s equivalent of the planning commission, sounded uncannily similar. Emerging market heads told the world community that they can’t ‘pull’ the rest of the world out of recession unless Western economies work very very hard to clean up the domestic mess, and put in place sound macroeconomic policies for growth.

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