The Saint
G20 finance ministers to meet in St Andrews
Jack Whiteley
Issue 134 - October 15, 2009
Finance ministers and banking officials representing member states of the "Group of Twenty" will meet in St Andrews during the first week of November.
The G20, made up of the 19 wealthiest countries in the world, plus the European Union, represents a significant majority of the global economy. Its finance ministers last met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in September.
The Pittsburgh summit focused, among other things, on regulatory financial policies, aiming to prevent another banking crisis similar to last year's meltdown.
Although the G20 finance ministers usually only meet once a year, they announced that a second meeting would take place in St Andrews after the Pittsburgh meetings concluded.
Details such as the venues to be used for the summit, and who will attend, have not yet been released for reasons of security.
Critics of the G20 have already organised a "counter conference", which aims to highlight global issues that some feel are not being addressed by the finance ministers.
The coalition known as Put People First will be holding its conference in the Union, where Rector Kevin Dunion and Vice-Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission Jan Bebbington are scheduled to speak.
"The G20 has many of the levers of power and its current policies are very unfair and are destroying the planet," Bebbington said.
"But," she continued, "people have power too, and it will be very interesting to see what comes out of their meeting."
PF broadly defines its goal as "economic justice", claiming "global finance benefits the rich at the expense of the poor and disempowered." PPF argues that "a further 200 million people will fall into poverty...as a result of footloose markets."
The counter conference's stated policy remains to promote debate, and not to disrupt the conference in any way.
"The finance ministers have a huge amount of power and their decisions will have a massive impact on how the entire world spends money", a spokesman said. "There has to be a radical overhaul if we are going to have a sustainable economy."
