Can that many people around the table get anything done?

How many of us ever heard of the G20? Wasn’t it the G8? Who are those other 12?

What’s going on at this summit in Washington?

For starters…

…the leaders gathering this weekend from the G20, a mix of industrial and emerging countries, plus the European Union, have cobbled together an agenda in a few frenetic weeks.

And they aren’t even used to working together as a ‘team’.

By convening the G20 rather than the closed, rich club of the G7, the old order has in effect acknowledged that the rest of the world has become too important to bar from the room. But what new order should take its place? Answering that question has been a parlour game for economists since long before the crisis. By encouraging them to dust off their pet ideas, the summit will at the very least create a bull market in new schemes for global economic governance.

Because everyone agrees that something big needs fixing and that the world expects action…

They’re looking at a Bretton Woods II possibility...

…a nod to a similar global economic summit held in July 1944 to reverse some of the painful trade and foreign exchange policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression…

But what is expected to remain front and center is the subject of regulation and how to best modernize the global financial system for the 21st century.

Is that a good idea? Since every issue is a moral issue, what’s the morality of this crisis and its solutions? And how can leaders find a solution that serves the common good?

Samuel Gregg, economics expert from the Acton Institute, is at least addressing these questions in Public Discourse. He starts with the question of whether the ‘top down’ approach to solving a financial crisis is the best idea. And he applies the wisdom of an earlier economic expert, Wilhelm Ropke, in basically saying….maybe not.

…Röpke stressed that almost all international governmental organizations eventually became dysfunctional, highly politicized, and hyper-bureaucratic, not to mention captured by interest groups pursing their own agendas.

Sounds terribly plausible.

International rules and moral norms established in the Middle Ages, no less, had the right idea. They were…

…derived from reflection on commercial practice as well as the demands of natural law.

How likely is it that those world leaders gathered around the table in Washington will bring up the natural law?

Back to the ‘top down’ strategy they likely are working on…

A ‘bottom-up’ strategy is certainly slower than that embodied by Bretton Woods. But it also militates against attempts to radically alter the rules governing international economic and financial transactions in response to a particular crisis. This is not always a bad thing.

Rules and institutions designed to respond to a specific economic problem of the near past are generally not very good at anticipating or responding to future crises. That is precisely why decisions made at Bretton Woods, designed to address the wreckage of the Great Depression and World War II, have limited relevance to today’s financial crisis.

Gregg is very realistic in his assessment.

It’s unlikely, of course, that many governments today will pay heed to suggestions made by a long-dead economist. The pressures to be seen to “do something” are probably too great. Still, Röpke reminds us that there is an alternative to the top-down strategy likely to be implemented in forthcoming months.

Not too many ‘experts’ out there right now sound convincing. Gregg does.