What Will New World Order Look Like?
Monday, June 18, 2012 at 10:19PM WSJ
Los Cabos in Mexico is by all accounts a delightful place: Chic hotels, excellent beaches and fine weather at this time of year. World leaders descending on the resort for this week's Group of 20 summit should make the most of what it has to offer. Nothing they discuss is likely to make any difference to the crisis raging in the global economy.
The world is now a different place to 2009 when, at summits in London and Pittsburgh, the leaders of the world's largest economies believed they had "saved the world"—as then-U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it—with a massive fiscal and monetary stimulus and a comprehensive agenda to reform the financial system. At the time, the G-20's response was hailed as the start of a new world order. It may turn out to have been the last gasp of an old world order.
That old world order began in 1944 at Bretton Woods in response to the Great Depression and the horrors that followed. One of its main architects was John Maynard Keynes, and his ideas have guided much of the current crisis response.
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