Six months after they met in London and established a $1.1 trillion-dollar support package for the staggering world economy, G20 members in their Pittsburgh summit were mulling other means of keeping their plan on track and implementing more reforms.
But, as before, the meeting was long on promise and short on details. Presenting a unanimous stance, world leaders pledged to undertake an aggressive and co-ordinated effort to overhaul banking practices and build a new global economic model, but couldn’t agree on how to do that or how they could limit bonuses for failed bankers who almost brought down the world’s economy, with mostly American and European institutions at fault.
The plan would set constraints on executive pay at financial firms, impose tougher standards on banks and launch a process aimed at correcting economic imbalances, such as China’s large trade surpluses and the United States’ huge deficits. It was described as a good starting point, but it was the third time in a year that the G20 had met to devise plans to help the world recover,  with only marginal progress on each occassion.
During the meeting, hosted by US President Barack Obama, the leaders offered emerging giants such as China, India and Brazil a major victory by giving them a seat at the top table in future global economic talks. Chinese President Hu Jintao said that governments should “make full use of the G20 platform” to tackle the world’s toughest economic problems and promote recovery. Smaller blocs like the G8 industrial nations would play a lesser role in the economy, though they will preserve a major role in foreign security affairs.
“We laid the groundwork today for long-term prosperity,” Obama said at a news conference at the conclusion of the summit. “Because our global economy is now fundamentally interconnected, we need to act together to make sure the recovery creates new jobs and industries while preventing the kind of imbalances and abuses that led us into this crisis.”
The reforms they proposed were said to be designed to prevent financial firms from taking the kinds of unnecessary risks that helped plunged the world into recession last September when the US investment bank Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse, but others and major banks were rescued. 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the deals should give people confidence that “such a crisis will never happen again” but she didn’t say how that would be accomplished and EU leaders failed to get a deal to cap bankers’ bonuses. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would walk out if that failed, but it did and he didn’t .  Still, the G20 leaders were also expected to pledge new international rules on capital standards for banks, in order to stop financial firms from holding too few funds to survive a downturn. Countries that haven’t adopted rules on capital requirements, including the United States, will pledge to do so by 2011. The so-called Basel II accord was agreed upon earlier this decade and has been in place in most European countries since 2007. The US is also pushing for the rules to be strengthened further in the coming years.
Before the talks even began, leaders reached what the White House called an “historic agreement” to secure the G20’s future as a place for discussions on the global economy. The bloc shot to prominence last year as the world’s worst recession in decades forced leaders to broaden their co-operation beyond only industrial nations. G20 countries together make up around 85 per cent of global economic output, and the decision to keep the bloc puts an end to the dominance of advanced economies on questions of global finance.
The G7 has met annually for more than 30 years. It consists of the largest developed economies: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, and since the 1990s has usually met with Russia as G8. Leaders said the G20 would become the “premier forum for their international economic co-operation”. Leaders have long pledged to keep the G7 and G8 as forums to discuss security issues, but it was clear that the G20 had become the new world economic order. 
The summit came amid signs that the global economy is recovering from its first recession since World War II. But despite calls for an exit strategy, leaders were unlikely to call for a major pullback from government interventions in the economy just yet. China’s Hu, who along with Obama has been most aggressive in using public spending to revive growth, called for countries to maintain their stimulus measures to keep the recovery alive.
  “All ­countries should keep up the intensity of their economic plans,” Hu said. EU officials warned that little progress was being made on narrowing differences on climate change. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said that efforts to reach a new global climate treaty by a December summit in Copenhagen were “in jeopardy”.