Edmund Conway: This is how depression looked in the 1930s
[Edmund Conway is Economics Editor of The Daily Telegraph.]
No-business meetings, John Kenneth Galbraith called them. They sprout in the wake of a crisis like weeds in scorched earth, nourished by the overwhelming sense that Something Must Be Done. Men gather, they sit in a room, they look pious; they are photographed, they talk to the press, they go home.
Politicians summon these grand meetings, said Galbraith, "not because there is business to be done but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."
They were what President Hoover kept himself busy with in the wake of the Great Crash. We may blithely assume that the problem in the early 1930s was torpidity, as the US government allowed the economic system slowly to disintegrate, but that wasn't how it felt at the time. The White House was a hive of activity, the president meeting everyone from politicians to industrialists and financiers. The problem was that nothing useful came of it.
Things are different these days, you might argue. I agree: rather than limiting themselves to meetings, politicians also invoke inquiries, investigations and reports. But the result has been the same. Historians will look back at the financial crisis that erupted last year and conclude that rather than taking direct, comprehensive action, politicians occupied themselves with no-business meetings, no-business reports and no-business plans which hid the fact that they had not a clue what they were doing.
With only a few weeks until the G20 meeting in London, there is nothing to dispel the impression that this will be another no-business meeting. The Americans and Europeans cannot agree on what to set at the top of the agenda; the US wants a bigger injection into the economy, the Europeans an overhaul of financial regulation, while the Britons sit, awkwardly, somewhere in between. The US Treasury is so beleaguered by domestic issues that it isn't even returning phone calls, according to the head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell.
Grand treaties which change global policy are not magicked up overnight. It took two years or so for officials to complete all the groundwork that led to the Bretton Woods agreement, which overhauled capital markets and currencies for most of the post-war era. So it is hardly a surprise that Whitehall insiders have been dampening speculation that either the finance ministers' summit this weekend or the heads of government summit next month will provide an overarching plan...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
No-business meetings, John Kenneth Galbraith called them. They sprout in the wake of a crisis like weeds in scorched earth, nourished by the overwhelming sense that Something Must Be Done. Men gather, they sit in a room, they look pious; they are photographed, they talk to the press, they go home.
Politicians summon these grand meetings, said Galbraith, "not because there is business to be done but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."
They were what President Hoover kept himself busy with in the wake of the Great Crash. We may blithely assume that the problem in the early 1930s was torpidity, as the US government allowed the economic system slowly to disintegrate, but that wasn't how it felt at the time. The White House was a hive of activity, the president meeting everyone from politicians to industrialists and financiers. The problem was that nothing useful came of it.
Things are different these days, you might argue. I agree: rather than limiting themselves to meetings, politicians also invoke inquiries, investigations and reports. But the result has been the same. Historians will look back at the financial crisis that erupted last year and conclude that rather than taking direct, comprehensive action, politicians occupied themselves with no-business meetings, no-business reports and no-business plans which hid the fact that they had not a clue what they were doing.
With only a few weeks until the G20 meeting in London, there is nothing to dispel the impression that this will be another no-business meeting. The Americans and Europeans cannot agree on what to set at the top of the agenda; the US wants a bigger injection into the economy, the Europeans an overhaul of financial regulation, while the Britons sit, awkwardly, somewhere in between. The US Treasury is so beleaguered by domestic issues that it isn't even returning phone calls, according to the head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell.
Grand treaties which change global policy are not magicked up overnight. It took two years or so for officials to complete all the groundwork that led to the Bretton Woods agreement, which overhauled capital markets and currencies for most of the post-war era. So it is hardly a surprise that Whitehall insiders have been dampening speculation that either the finance ministers' summit this weekend or the heads of government summit next month will provide an overarching plan...