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Editorial: Obama must take lead on global crisis
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The great success of the global-meltdown summit might have been simply getting 21 world leaders together in Washington on only three weeks' notice.
The summit's concluding statement, strong on generalities, light on specifics, apparently failed to impress world financial markets.
President Bush got the leaders' continuing commitment to free markets, and they seem to have headed off such knee-jerk and counterproductive national responses to hard times like protective tariffs.
World economic problems have traditionally been the province of the eight top industrial democracies: the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada, Italy, and, as a recent addition, Russia.
This summit marked the emergence of China and India as major actors in the world's economic councils.
The leaders reached a broad consensus that more and better regulation of financial markets is needed to make those markets more accountable and transparent and less risky.
The details of how this is to be done was left to the various finance ministries.
The leaders stopped well short of endorsing a global regulatory authority that some of them seemed to want. And they did not agree on any kind of global stimulus action like coordinated rate cuts or tax cuts or spending.
There is no good time for a global financial crisis, but coming just as the United States is changing presidents may be the worst.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush rightly agreed that the United States has only one president at a time, so the president-elect was not at the summit, although he did have observers there.
However, on Jan. 20, the proposed reform of the global financial system becomes Obama's problem.
There is much talk in the foreign press that the United States has lost its position as the world's financial leader, but the fact is, when the summit reconvenes, all eyes in the room are going to turn to only one person.
Obama doesn't have much time.
The one concrete agreement among the leaders was that they would meet again by the end of next April.
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Posted by praisequeen on November 21, 2008 at 8:40 a.m.
That "citizen of the world" speech is what swung the votes, and also proved that he wasn't the type to focus on mud slinging as did his opponent. And that spine that you speak of is what brought him, and all the rest of us this far. He'll get the job done- we always have, over hundreds of years, we have been getting the job done for you. And the media pass was not free- the votes were. And guess what? HE'S STILL YOUR PRESIDENT, TOO!!! President-Elect Obama does have quite the job to do. He has to clean up the crash that was left behind.
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