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February 18, 2011 at 05:16 AM
Disagreement heralded the Friday opening of the meeting of the G20, as disputes on Thursday over how to identify and benchmark trade imbalances kept bankers and ministers from reaching an agreement.
Reuters reported that efforts have so far failed to reach a preliminary accord in Paris about measures used to identify and deal with economic mismatches that could signal future financial woes.
Christine Lagarde, France’s economy minister, characterized the effort to come up with an accord as major progress. She told a conference of the Institute of International Finance, “This is something which is highly debated at the moment and will be in the next couple of days, because some countries do not want to be identifiable as doing such and such a policy.” She went on to add, “We will already have taken a big step forward if we get an agreement in principle … on the elements that allow us to measure imbalances.”
