At summit, proposals but few concrete steps

“Make no mistake: This is the greatest economic challenge of our times,” Obama said Saturday in the weekly Democratic radio address. “And while the road ahead will be long and the work will be hard, I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis.”

The president-elect himself did not weigh in after the summit about whether he agreed with the thrust of the leaders’ broad goals. But he indicated the global gathering was a good idea because “our global economic crisis requires a coordinated global response,” he said Saturday.

Translating the leaders’ sweeping principles into specific actions will be difficult. “That’s the rub. That’s where you really see the differences across countries in what you want to do,” Goldstein said. “In the coming months, we’ll see to what extent Obama’s agenda will conflict with the Europeans.”

Leaders pledged to make the global financial system more accountable to investors and less vulnerable to risky investing. But there are sure to be differences of opinion on exactly how to accomplish that, which could impede progress at the next summit in the spring.

To provide relief from the current woes, the leaders supported the benefits of enacting government spending plans to stimulate their economies. But they stopped short of a commitment for all to act at the same time, as some Europeans had favored.

The Bush administration has reacted coolly to the idea of a second U.S. stimulus plan.

For Wall Street, the leaders’ talk about ways to provide relief probably will be of more importance than efforts to prevent another financial fiasco, experts said. Even without new concrete commitments for government spending, tax cuts or interest rate reductions, the fact that leaders came together to address the crisis and did not let it become a blame game should help bolster some confidence on Wall Street, according to Goldstein, Yamarone and others.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, appearing on CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday, warned against the making any new financial rules of the road too restrictive.

“There is an inclination, when you get into problems like this to go to an extreme, to over regulate, to think that we’re going to have a worldwide compensation system. How is that going to be done? I think we have to be careful, we have to find a balance and we can’t over regulate so that five years from now we’re trying to claw our way back because we overdid it,” he said.

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