dibya’s blogosphere

Asked by a reporter what the minimum requirement would be for the summit to be a success and prevent a market collapse, Mr Brown gave a simple answer, then the sort of laugh that suggested he had cut straight to the bottom line. “For you to report it as a success,” he said.

Mr Brown and the other world leaders gathering in London are concentrating furiously on managing media expectations so they can declare Thursday’s meeting a triumph.

Kevin Rudd is joining in with gusto, with the added aim of showing his own voters at home that he is playing in thebig league and not just making up the numbers. The Prime Minister’s spin in Australia has largely been about his own role in shaping the summit, for instance offering some rather unnecessary advice to the Americans and others that they should deal with their toxic bank assets.

Mr Rudd said last night at a news conference with Mr Brown that the spending initiatives being taken by individual governments around the world to bail out their economies had actually been “in response to the call” by the last G20 summit for co-ordinated action.

There is no evidence of any such co-ordination, nor that any government has cut a tax or spent a dollar in response to the G20′s urgings.

Mr Rudd, we are told, has supposedly been in constant brain-storming contact with Mr Brown, a fact that has somehow eluded the notice of senior aides in Downing Street.

When Mr Brown spoke last week about his contacts with foreign leaders he named Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and leaders from Europe, Latin America, India, Japan and China.

There was no mention of Mr Rudd, although Mr Brown did add that he had consulted “all the members from the Asian countries”.

The political posturing surrounding the summit was highlighted by Mr Brown’s declaration last night – with Mr Rudd’s endorsement – that the “the world will rise to the challenge and defeat those who say doing nothing is the answer”.

But let us be clear, no government in the world is saying that “doing nothing” is the answer. Mr Brown is actually referring to his domestic opponents in the Conservative Party, who have called for spending restraint and are likely to unseat Mr Brown in an election next year unless the summit is such a spectacular success it casts him as saviour of the world economy.

The priority now for Mr Brown, Mr Obama and the rest of the leaders at the summit is to emerge from 4 1/2 hours of talks on Thursday and declare they are united, no matter what it is they are actually united on.

The problem is that Mr Brown has made a declaration of victory harder by talking in the lead-up to the summit about a co-ordinated fiscal stimulus that is simply not going to be agreed on Thursday.

The major players have taken their own steps to pump up their economies, but those actions have not been co-ordinated and have certainly not been in response to urging from Mr Brown and Mr Obama, let alone from Mr Rudd.

Six weeks ago, the British organisers of the summitt issued a planning document, The Road to the London Summit, which noted that the major nations had already taken their own fiscal stimulus measures, adding that in London they “will want to monitor very closely the global impact and consider whether further action may be warranted”.

The Obama administration urged foreign governments to spend up rather than freeloading on the back of Washington’s fiscal boost, and as recently as last week Mr Brown was raising expectations of such an agreement by declaring: “We will also see next week the biggest … co-ordinated fiscal stimulus that the world has ever seen.”

But Germany, France and others say they will make their own spending decisions and that any further measure should wait until the impact of past spending is clear, leaving Mr Obama and Mr Brown back-pedalling and playing down expectations.

A draft communique leaked to a German magazine referred to the $US2 trillion ($2.9 trillion) of fiscal stimulus that has already taken place, but a later draft dropped even that reference. Given that there will be no truly co-ordinated fiscal stimulus, the priority for Mr Brown and his guests is to ensure they come up with enough “deliverables” – specific agreements on things such as tax havens, trade credits and IMF reform – to declare a united victory.

Mr Brown’s point man in organising the summit, Mark Malloch Brown, has admitted in a frank comment just how high the stakes are in the game of managing expectations and declaring unity for unity’s sake. “If indeed we get anodyne committee conclusions where all substance has been taken out of them, the markets on April 3 will be something of a disaster zone, I have no doubt.”