Major pain for world economy if G20 reforms not adopted: Bank of Canada

By Lidia Kelly

By Simon Johnson The April 2009 London summit of the G20 is widely regarded as having been a great success.  The world’s largest economies agreed on an immediate coordinated approach to the global financial crisis then raging and promised to work together on banking reforms that would support growth.  At the time, President Obama got high marks for his constructive engagement.

Apparently all it takes to kick the world out of a secular recession and back into growth mode, is for several dozen finance ministers and central bankers to sit down and sign on the dotted line, agreeing it has to be done. That is the take home message from the just concluded latest G-20 meeting in Syndey, where said leaders agreed that it is time to finally grow the world economy by 2% over the next 5 years.

By Wayne Cole and Jane Wa

The G20 Finance Ministers’ Meeting in Sydney in February 2014 provided a convivial winter break for the global economic elite. Travellers from the Northern Hemisphere could enjoy the Southern summer. Everybody could escape domestic political traumas, spending a few days amongst peers in luxury paid for by taxpayers. They could bask in the slavish adulation of the local popular press who were in awe of the gathered central banking ‘rock stars’ and the charms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) President Christine Lagarde.

TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan shocked markets on Thursday with a radical overhaul of its policymaking, adopting a new balance sheet target and pledging to double its government bond holdings in two years as it seeks to end nearly two decades of deflation.

The world’s biggest economies have agreed to target reforms aimed at adding more than US $2trn to the global economy over five years

LONDON — A release of methane in the Arctic could speed the melting of sea ice and climate change with a cost to the global economy of up to US$60-trillion over coming decades, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the Netherlands used economic modelling to calculate the consequences of a release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane from thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.