Bringing it all back home?
You can save the world - without necessarily saving yourself. I suspect that will be the final moral of the London G20 summit for Gordon Brown.
It is looking like several rabbits are going to be pulled out of the hat this afternoon for a trillion dollar package to help the world. (See previous updates.)
There is plenty of real significance here - especially the general increase in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and the new lending resources for the IMF.
You could say they are cheap commitments - as it happens, they aren't going to cost the member governments very much hard cash.
But that somewhat understates the significance. The fact is that countries such as Germany and Japan have always been opposed to money for poor countries which has no strings attached. And they feared that a global increase in liquidity - like the SDR allocation - would be inflationary. To have persuaded them otherwise is no mean feat, even if the deflationary global environment clearly made it easier.
But here's the issue for Brown: how do you bring it all home to the UK? How do you show British voters it will make a difference to them?
If other big countries do more to boost their economies, that will help ours - heaven knows, we don't have much room to do more ourselves.
If the IMF can provide help to Eastern European countries in trouble, then that will lessen the impact of those crises on us (remembering how much they have borrowed from our banks).
And more generally, if the global economy doesn't recover, there is no chance at all that the UK's will.
But - with all that, there is no getting round the fact that the greatest beneficiaries of today's summit are not in a position to vote for Gordon Brown. When the leaders have all flown home, the story in the UK may be much the same as it was before.
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