To the extent that global governance can help us out of the recession, it is interesting that it has been the G20 that has been the body tasked to do it - no UN (of course), no OECD, some developing participation, but not too much, no treaty framework, giving the group flexibility ... it very much has a Concert of Europe feel.  We told you about their first meeting here - it produced a combination of the somewhat substantive and the diplomatic blatherous.  The second meeting comes in April, which is when something serious is supposed to have happened; this weekend, the G20 finance ministers met for a "how'm I doing?" pre-meeting.

The pre-meeting disappointed, and one problem seems to be that Germany reiterated its opposition to a further Keynesian stimulus.  Simon Johnson, a fantastic crisis blogger, and big supporter of government intervention in the economy, is driven to inarticulateness about it here.  He appears to believe that we are at a high noon, where government breaks the banks or gets broken by them, which is interestingly proto-Marxist, here.  And his recommendation?

Oh, only two trillion for stabilization.  Prior experience suggests to me that much of this gets given to the banks that Johnson thinks government must destroy.  But I may be missing something.

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