Greek crisis, other global financial woes crash the G-20 party in Cannes - Washington Post

As the Group of 20 convenes its annual summit on Thursday, the rhetoric will — as usual — focus on the benefits of cooperation and the strides nations are making to further it. But in terms of concrete action, this might be the meeting where an organization meant to nudge the global economy in a more efficient direction recognizes its limits.

At the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the group agreed on the need for a massive government stimulus plan that for a brief moment had China, Europe, the U.S. and others pulling in the same direction. But those entities have been pulling on different oars ever since.

The stimulus agreement "provided a very strong sense that indeed it was the committee that ran the world. ... After that, every single G-20 meeting has been less impactful than the prior one," said Moises Naim, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The G-20 includes the top industrialized nations as well as the major emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil. Major international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund also participate in the talks.

With an already sluggish global economy showing signs of slowing further, officials said they hope their two-day summit will produce substantive action to bolster world growth.

But the meeting here on the French Riviera has been noticeably overshadowed by events in Greece and elsewhere, and by a sense that the world's great powers aren't immune to the whims of small nations.

Greece's surprise call for a referendum that might prompt its exit from the euro zone has dominated discussion and forced the summit host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to call emergency talks over a crisis in his own back yard.

He had hoped to use his year-long chairmanship of the G-20 to push on broad and long-term global economic reforms — changing the international monetary system and finding ways to ease the effect of commodity prices swings on poor countries.

Instead he is battling to keep the euro intact.

"We won't let the euro be destroyed. We won't let Europe be destroyed," Sarkozy said after the emergency talks Wednesday ended in an ultimatum that Greece either comply with the economic rigors needed to stay in the euro zone or prepare to withdraw from it.

A follow-up meeting among the G-20's euro zone members — France, Germany and Italy — was called for Thursday morning. European stocks, buoyed briefly by crisis plans announced in Brussels last week, continued a recent slide when markets opened this morning.

"The most important aspect of our task over the next two days is to resolve the financial crisis here in Europe," President Obama, who arrived early Thursday and immediately met with Sarkozy, told reporters. He said he agreed with the French president that "the E.U. has made some important steps towards a comprehensive solution. ... We also discussed the situation in Greece and how we can work to resolve that situation as well."