ABSTRACT
The severity of the economic and financial crisis of 2007–2008 forced a reluctant US president and allies from the advanced and emerging economies together under the aegis of a reformulated Group of Twenty (G20) leaders’ forum. In this hastily arranged exercise in crisis management, much of the corrective and economic stimulus agreed was nation-state focused; it was bilateral and ad hoc. Broad-based international solutions were only partly formed or in the initial design stages. But the Washington summit would also prove to be the start of a paradigm shift, a reassertion of state authority over global markets and firms, the beginning of a multiyear process of reform and redesign led by the G20 leaders advised by their trusted technical transnational community of central bankers.
