Great post!

I'm annoyed that the person who kidnapped the real Josh Marshall is pushing his misleading attempt to write off Czech's positions to posturing for dramatic effects and relevance.

He did the same thing yesterday when he lumped DeSantis with some anonymous bankers to pretend that Wall Street is saying "fuck you" to Treasury and Obama.

Is it true that Germany and France (the other EEC members are small beer) are not engaged in fiscal stimulus?

After all fiscal stimulus is nothing much more than substituting public debt for private debt -- deficit spending. What with their expensive social safety nets Germany and France look set to do quite a bit of deficit spending soon if not sooner.

Part of the fallout from the last eight years is our increasing irrelevance as the "world's only superpower". We have no leverage, either militarily or economically and the world knows it.

It no longer matters if we think the Czech president of the EU is a rightwing clown, it matters what the EU thinks - and does. There is going to be intense pressure by the EU which sees its advantage in our economic downfall in replacing the dollar standard with the EURO. The more dollars we pump into the world system the more worthless it becomes. The EU is going to hunker down, watch us spend ourselves silly and then pounce.

"WE WELCOME EUROS" will be the sign next to the cash register at your neighborhood McDonald's...

Here is one Londoner's wry take on the G20:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23666030-details/Stay+home,+swap+notes+by+email:+London+does+not+need+this+summit/article.do

I'll just chime in with a couple of points. EU monetary policy is behind the curve, and they could be doing more to expand credit. The ECB is also a lot weaker than the US Fed, and so can't just start printing money willy-nilly like Helicopter Ben is doing. And their banking crisis is somewhat different. In the US the earthquake has hit. In Europe there is still a ticking time-bomb with the possibility of Eastern European sovereign defaults and EE banks. So their situation is simply very different.

As for fiscal policy, the main point of any recession/depression spending is supposed to be primarily psychological - people will spend and invest when they don't fear losing everything by losing their job. So you throw money at them until they begin to feel optimistic. The automatic stabilizers that they have in Europe cannot be compared to 'stimulus spending' on a dollar for dollar basis. It is the psychological effect of knowing that if you lose your job/business, you won't lose your health insurance, your kids can still go to college, you won't have to move to that dangerous neighborhood, and so on. That kind of social insurance that is much broader in Europe effects as a psychological stabilizer which has no equivalent in the US. So their stimulus might be less dollar for dollar (even taking into account Q's points), but is probably as or more effective than the gazillions Obama is throwing at the nation over the next two years.

czech is the country that insists on calling itself "central european" (chip on the shoulder there???) according to my russian friend. AND probably is terrified of anything sounding even remotely like socialism. Don't they run on bully-capitalism?

Crazy czechs. Sorry, radek. you know I still love ya.

Just to point out something that may be fairly obvious, generally the EU countries have already been putting far more money into just such government projects as are discussed in the U.S. as means of stimulus (infrastructure, unemployment benefits etc.)

That is not to say that this would not be an opportune time to do more, but it seems rather silly to compare figures without taking something like this into consideration.

Someone already pointed out that, inexplicably, a vast majority of the EU and other European countries currently have liberalist governments (i.e. right-of-centre, although there is a prominent difference in that those parties tend to be liberal both economically and socially, unlike in the U.S.) This certainly influences decisions made on the EU side; and at the risk of further pointing out the obvious, the effects, symptoms and causes of financial problems in the EU are not identical to those of the U.S. and may not benefit from an identical treatment.

Well it's just like the war in Iraq. Even assuming that European leaders had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, why should they have risked their own political futures on all that unpleasantness, when George W. Bush was practically begging to go it alone?

Same principle: why should they fork over their own Euros when their banks are loading up on AIG dollars courtesy of Uncle Sam?

Updates. (Worth stating that things pretty much appear to be as Surowiecki laid out, though they're still working on it):

New York Times April 2 print edition:

In Europe, Obama Faces Calls for Rules on Finances

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK LANDLER
Germany and France want global financial regulations that could reach inside America’s borders, while President Obama is pushing for more stimulus.

....Sarkozy of France did not repeat an earlier threat to walk out of the conference — “I just got here,” he joked — he made it clear he would reject an agreement that puts off stringent new regulations on banks, tax havens, and hedge funds.....

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany rejected Mr. Obama’s plea for other nations to follow America’s lead and pledge greater fiscal spending to stimulate their economies. She said more spending was not worth debating. “That is not a bargaining chip,” she said, adding, by contrast, “Regulation is something that is in everyone’s interest.”....

....it appeared likely that countries would divide into two or three camps.

The United States, Britain and Japan will push for more immediate stimulus and “systemic risk” regulators that mostly operate within national borders; Germany and France will push the opposite position, probably with some support from the Czech Republic.

That leaves China and Russia, among others, to exploit the division to play a significant role, though if tradition holds the major differences are likely to be smoothed out in wording in a final communiqué that each country interprets differently.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown used a joint news conference earlier in the day to emphasize that differences with France and Germany were “vastly overstated.”

Mr. Brown argued that the world had learned the hard lessons of a similar summit meeting here in 1933, which ended in failure. That outcome will not be repeated, Mr. Brown argued....

Updated story posted to website "11 minutes ago." Obama's team is trying to cut down the universal cross-border regulations than Germany and France want:

Global Leaders Meet in Bid to Resolve Rift on Economic Plan

By MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER:

....Negotiators from the United States and Europe worked frantically to hash out an agreement on new regulations, a day after France and Germany signaled a rift over the level of scrutiny that regulators should have over hedge funds and global financial institutions.

While the United States was determined to resist European efforts to create regulatory authorities with cross-border authority, officials said the two sides were trying to hash out policies on transparency and early risk warnings for banks that would placate France and Germany.

“There’s not going to be a ceding of sovereignty to a global regulator,” said a White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were confidential.

France and other Europeans countries also pressed China to accept action against tax havens, a step it has resisted because of the possible consequences for its coastal banking centers, Hong Kong and Macao.

“I think we’re going to see an agreement,” said Stephen Timms, the financial secretary to the Treasury Department. “I am expecting sanctions against tax havens. We want that pressure to be maintained.”....