Economic summit has little chance of success

updated 6:47 p.m. ET Nov. 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - World leaders are heading for a clash of expectations at this weekend's summit on the global economic crisis.

Europeans are looking urgently for broad changes and tighter universal banking regulations. With two months left in office, President Bush isn't ready to go nearly that far.

And there's a limit to what he could deliver anyway, given his lame-duck status, since other leaders might be hesitant to make deals with a departing administration.

President-elect Obama, the leader who soon will assume the job of trying to keep the U.S. economy from capsizing, won't even be at the table.

Saturday's 20-nation gathering will include leaders of the Group of Eight big industrial democracies — the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Canada and Italy — as well as other major economies, including China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, currently president of the European Union, has emphasized urgency, saying "We are in an economic crisis. ... We have to react and we have no time to lose."

Bush convened the emergency session after receiving heavy pressure from Sarkozy during a meeting last month at Camp David, Md. It is to be the first of a series of such gatherings to map out a coordinated response to the world's worst financial crisis in decades, one that began with losses in U.S. housing markets and quickly spread overseas.

Bush resisted Sarkozy's appeals that the summit be held in New York, and he diluted the influence of Europe by making it a 20-nation session instead of just the Group of Eight.

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The summit offers Bush what may be a last chance on the world stage to move beyond a legacy of war emergencies and bank bailouts by helping to launch what he called a possible new framework for "democratic capitalism." But he warned that it should not come at the expense of "free markets, free enterprise and free trade."

Different leaders bring to the meeting different perspectives and expectations.

"That's the dangerous part in trying to achieve a common agenda. They'll try to push their own perceptions of what a global architecture should look like and who should be the dominant players," said Charles Freeman, a former Bush administration trade official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"I'm not sure that even an Obama team wants to see the United States' style and method of capitalism and financial markets converted. We value our flexibility here, and I don't think we're willing to capitulate to as much regulation as the Europeans are suggesting, particularly the French."

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