PM Brown Lays Down the Gauntlet in Joint Appearance with Obama

At first I wondered if the headline writer for the G20′s London Summit website got a little ahead of the principals.

At 11 a.m. EDT here in the U.S., the top story on the front page was headed: World ‘a few hours’ from global plan for economic recovery and reform.  That’s a big statement.  It’s like, get all these powerwigs together and poof, crisis over.

Well, it’s what U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said earlier today in a news conference with President Barack Obama:

Mr Brown said the ‘first duty’ of the world leaders gathering in London was to the ordinary people suffering as a result of the global economic crisis and anxious about their jobs, their mortgages and their futures.

‘We are within a few hours, I think, of agreeing a global plan for economic recovery and reform and I think the significance of this is that we are looking at every aspect,’ he said.

I’m looking forward to today’s later presser – the one with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.  Merkel spent the weekend telling anyone who would listen that there’s too much spending going on, while Sarkozy has taken to blaming the whole economic mess on the “Anglo-Saxons.”

I think things boil down to this on the eve of the Summit.  Brown and Obama want more worldwide stimulus and cooperation on regulatory reform for the financial system.  Merkel and Sarkozy are off tilting at windmills talking about ‘offshore tax havens’ and hedge funds – neither of which have anything to do with the root cause of the worldwide slump.

Perhaps Brown knows something the rest of us don’t, something that will be revealed “within a few hours.”