If there is one consistent cliché in the cloud of platitudes that billows forth about the tremendous importance of the G20, it is that the grouping gives big emerging markets their long-awaited seat at the table.
So it is more than a little disturbing that India, one of the most important of such governments, thinks said table conversation is marked more by sterile dissent than constructive debate. It is even more disturbing that Brazil is prepared to leave its chair empty.
Top officials from Manmohan Singh’s government told the Financial Times this week that the G20 was in “serious difficulties”, with no agreement on diagnosis. Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, the man who had the courage to call a currency war a currency war, decided not to attend this week’s meeting of ministers and central bank governors in South Korea at all. And on Wednesday Ali Babacan, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, weighed in with his own concerns that the positions taken by the grouping were sinking to a lowest common denominator.