G-20 ministers to talk Eurozone, fiscal cliff

The G-20 finance ministers will be meeting this weekend in Mexico. Recent such meetings have featured plenty of piling on the Europeans about the Eurozone crisis response, but at this iteration the Europeans may be the ones asking some tough questions: A German government official said on Thursday that Germany would ask the United States ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

The G-20 finance ministers will be meeting this weekend in Mexico. Recent such meetings have featured plenty of piling on the Europeans about the Eurozone crisis response, but at this iteration the Europeans may be the ones asking some tough questions:

The G-20 finance ministers will be meeting this weekend in Mexico. Recent such meetings have featured plenty of piling on the Europeans about the Eurozone crisis response, but at this iteration the Europeans may be the ones asking some tough questions:

A German government official said on Thursday that Germany would ask the United States again what it was planning to do about the fiscal cliff.

However Germany was expecting to hear that the issue cannot be resolved until after U.S. presidential and congressional elections on Tuesday, a day after the G20 meeting ends.

"You understand that from a European view, these are important questions also for the world economy that we want to factor out," the German government official said.

They won’t be getting any answers from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, at least not directly. As Flavia Krause-Jackson and Simon Kennedy pointed out in this piece, Geithner won’t be attending. In fact, turnout for the meeting will be underwhelming all around:

As Mexico gears up to host finance officials from the Group of 20 biggest economies a number of key absences threaten to turn the gathering into a non-event.

The no-shows at the Nov. 4-5 meeting in Mexico City include European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, as well as the finance chiefs from Brazil and France. The presence of People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan is uncertain. Without these power- wielding players, chances of having a meaningful gathering are slim to none, analysts said.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

Tag: EU

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