we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. welcome back to join us you're watching live from moscow a look at the top stories lidia's rebel forces have stormed curled obvious compound in tripoli and once again claim to have controlled the city but could offer loyalist continue their armed resistance with their meter fouling the fights to the death. russian investigators say they have information about who ordered the murder of the prominent russian journalist anna politkovskaya five years ago as follows tuesday's arrest of a former key witness in the case a retired senior police official suspected of organizing the killing. and came

to me truly to be edified help talks as part of a north korean leader's first visit to russia almost a decade he's been touring said the area in the far east on his armor train with tight security involving dozens of guards that's what happened here until back at the top of the hour was more updates as always mean time we'll bring you our debate show crosstalk. keep. following the welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle as the leaders of the group of eat meat in france more and more question the usefulness of this elite club of countries is it just a talking shop can it really influence the global agenda like it once did and should the g eight be abandoned in favor of g twenty.

cross-talk the group of eight i'm joined by andrew hilton in london he is director and joint founder of the center for the study of financial innovation in istanbul we crossed and paul heinbecker is a former advisor to canadian prime ministers on foreign policy and now a distinguished fellow at the center for international governance innovation and in toronto we have jeff rubin he's a former chief economist for a north american investment bank journalist and author all right folks gentlemen this is crosstalk and you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it and i do it andrew first in london this looking at some of the other pictures that are coming out of the g eight. festivals i think you could call it in france it looks very very impressive but is it just really just a talking shop do they ever really decidedly thing and in the year two thousand and eleven is the g. eight powerful enough to drive the global agenda a lot of questions seaside or

a couple of days at the seaside i think it you know if it is only a talking shop talking shops are quite important it's important that these guys should get together and talk informally amongst themselves after all that's how this group actually originated in the first place twenty years ago so i don't think that's that's a relevant itself it has a value but certainly the g. eight has been screen on the one hand. important countries in the world these days of the united states and china which is the g two all the g twenty or perhaps even the g thirty to bring in some of the really important developing countries so the g. eight is more symbolic than anything else paul do you agree with that is it's more symbolic than anything else it is in istanbul because if it's just symbolic and why waste all the money ok because i work in media everybody has to go to the g eight and another story happens in the world and we get squeezed because we don't have the resources to cover real important stories. well the media is part of the

problem worse you have you have built up the g eight into some kind of enormous event and it's full of photo ops i'm not saying the politicians aren't also complicit in that but it has got to the point where it couldn't deliver on what it was promising because it was promising too much that was one of the problems and the other problem in the world and changed and of course you have china india and brazil indonesia turkey korea these countries now matter a lot and the g eight just doesn't have them at the table so the g eight really has two reasons for being now. i think perhaps three one is. it gives the european leaders and the canadian leader but especially the european leaders privileged access to the u.s. president for a day and a half that they wouldn't otherwise have they don't get that it's much at the g. twenty. it also is an organization where you can still rally the western the sort

of western willingness to do things to stump up the money for places like libya or egypt and the last thing is it's a place where these guys can get together and talk to their peers in a more relaxed manner than they can at the g. twenty there's more at stake in the g. twenty and and so the g. eight is less. is less of a challenge for fidgeting justifying going to you in toronto how do you come out on this just a talking shop and if it is a talking shop as it is and you point out an important talking shop. it may be a talking shop but i think for anything more than add it's increasingly dysfunctional and well of it i think organizations like the g eight or the g twenty probably had their zenith of influence after the last recession where of course we saw massive coordinated fiscal policy but none of those governments have the financial

wherewithal to ever do that again and moreover many of those governments like europe china and the u.s. are moving in very disparate and contradictory ways so i don't think that we're going to see anything substantive out of it but i think as your line of questioning indicates expectations of these kind of events have fallen dramatically in the last couple of years and if i go to you i mean in researching this program it's often called a rich man's club that does not keep its promises do you think that's a fair assessment. well i think that's true on both counts yes i think it's very interesting just how low expectations are for this particular meeting one would have thought that given the problems that the european economies face given the problems the economic problems which the global economy faces and economics would have played a big part but instead it's very much focused on eight pound political issues supporting the arab spring the japanese are talking about you know making

a pitch for a trade agreement i agree but the focus is primarily political leaving the bigger economic issues i think the bilateral negotiations between the united states and germany representing the european union on the run and. the g. twenty with a much much broader agenda later in the year i just think that i cannot remember a g seven or g eight meeting with expectations that. well you could use one of them one of the issues is trying to interject it's on purpose of you know they're doing this on purpose they have said that the g twenty is their preferred. institution for coordinating international economic policy and they have tried therefore to to limit the g. eight to political security kinds of issues so that's why you find i'm talking about but i do agree though that i mean the first person who thought the g eight made me may not be necessary anymore was sorry cozy himself the host for this

meeting who was expressing doubts last summer whether you know what it the value was but. on the other hand the french have added so many things to be agenda from the internet to the arab spring to climate change and commodities and so on that they're ending up with a very large sort of. very large number of dishes on the table none of which are going to be properly cooked probably jeff you know it's interesting i mean from what we've heard already in this discussion here it's really agenda light it has to be agenda light because no one is going to make any really big decisions a specially financial economic without speaking to the chinese first because they count and they count a lot now. oh well it may be agenda light but the economy is certainly not agenda light i think whether you're talking about china or europe or the us the recovery is facing probably its greatest so that's the challenge is that

it has at this point i mean we're already seeing oil prices at hundred fifteen dollars a barrel we're already seeing food prices above last cycles peak we're seeing inflationary fallout from that and rising interest rates so there's no set there's no lack of issues to talk about as far as the economy's agenda is concerned even though that's not going to make the agenda this week's meetings jim so you're very interesting that you know i think it's i think it's very interesting is that you know the g eight is meeting to solve the world's problems we'll talk about that if it's just out of self-interest but it doesn't and it has been brought up here they're not dealing with their own real problems and when we look at getting out of this deep recession not all these members are on the same page and not by any stretch of the imagination. i think that's means that there's going to be some very important discussions taking place in the margins which aren't going really to be reflected in the formal agenda or in the communique afterwards i would imagine that

look there's going to be tremendous discussion. amongst the europeans and between the europeans and the americans on the sovereign debt crisis in europe there are going to be discussions on the the managing director of the i.m.f. that probably will be settled over the next couple of days effectively these are important issues which are not really appearing on the agenda but they'll certainly be dominating the margins of the meetings and that probably is where journalists and other people will look for the most important outcome of the meeting i doubt very much if they're really going to commit large sums of money to support the arab countries of the middle east and north africa i'd like to think they would but i think they're quite serious differences of opinion there and trying to commit billions of dollars to support can easier or wherever it is i think is probably a step too far at this stage paul if i can go to you and i'm not going to ask anyone here to be a middle east expert here but i think it's quite interesting this picture of aid for attorneys in egypt and you know

a lot of people that are critical of western involvement in north africa would say you know you know the money my comment is going to be all these strings attached and it's going to be the west involving itself in this very complicated and long term transformation i mean is is that it's shows it is the west trying to flex its muscle saying we're going to stay engaged in this region and they may think it's for good reasons but a lot of people in the region don't see it that way. there's a degree of cynicism in what you're saying there and i don't think that i share it what we're seeing in the arab world especially in tunisia and egypt is there is a nascent movement towards something that's a lot more in our interest in a lot more in their interest and more particularly and that is a more progressive in a more democratic government society we can we just don't have the smarts to be able to direct that kind of thing but we do have the capacity to to assist and to back them up as a go ahead. it may be that we're in financial difficulties but we're not going to

be in financial difficulties forever and this is an opportunity that is not going to soon come again i think so the idea that somehow the west should keep its nose out of that you know it reminds me a little bit about. when we went into libya in the first place a lot of people were saying all the arabs don't want you there the arabs who didn't want us there with. the now bankrupt leaders of the arab world the autocrats. who are running the place the people in the street the closer you got to the fighting the closer you got to the bullets flying the more they want to help so i think that we should be a little bit careful about deprecating what the west can do and indeed what the chinese and the indians can do my only problem with this is that the g. eight is a kind of an event and it can rally support and it can produce some resources but it isn't enough it isn't going to be you know it's going to be much more useful if

you could get the chinese and indian and others to agree to this kind of process to get involved in it and because what we're talking about in egypt and in and in tunisia is going to be economic growth and that's going to take investment and that investment some of it has to come from places like india and china rather than from the wet ok gentlemen at this point we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the world's most evil. disclosed stakes are. plain to. see. in the. wealthy british style. markets. scandal find out what's really happening to the global economy for

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a guy peter lavelle remind you we're discussing the relative value of ga. play the game. ok jeff in toronto we probably were to the break you said you wanted to jump in so just go right ahead. right well let's not also forget what has driven our involvement in the region and that is that when you produce thirty percent of world oil supply you tend to catch a lot of attention from the largest world oil consumers and i think some of the skepticism around what's happening in libya is why are we intervening in libya a country that produces one point six million barrels a day and not intervening in other places like yemen and bahrain that doesn't have that kind of oil supply and i guess you know one thing we've got to remember is where we have intervened in the middle east and i say the west stance a bully they increase energy supply typically what's happened is that we've ended

up getting less energy supply and any time there's been regime change and it doesn't really matter what the ology of the regime change is whether it's the replacement by the shah by the iranian revolution whether it's deposing saddam hussein the net result has been that that country has produced less oil and even more significantly exported less oil and of course we're inviting a similar kind of a similar kind of result here in libya where we've already lost about one point three million barrels a day of production and given how tight the world oil supply is that doesn't seem like anybody including saudi arabia can make up that shortfall well it's interesting it will certainly keep prices very high and you if i can go to you i mean again going back to the g. eight here i mean it's interesting the kind of what they want to project a caring you know we want to help these people we want to get it it's going to be aids it's going to be food security it's all the other security here but if you

look at it it's still very much out of self interest not of the self interest of the member countries if they can agree on those issues so i mean it's if we don't have to look for you know this kind of. soft and furry west you know helping the rest of the world if they're making money off of it they're making very cold calculations about themselves. i think that's right when it comes to the middle east i disagree quite strongly with what i think paul was saying that we went into libya and when we were cheered in the streets we went into libya and we were cheered by about thirty percent of the population in the streets about thirty percent is indifference and thirty percent support because afaik we've learned quite a lot of that this is a tribal society and i think obama was absolutely right to be skeptical about the british and french pressure to intervene we are slowly learning when it comes to north africa or in the middle east that intervention is very dangerous very difficult words are cheap but it's very difficult to see how intervention military

intervention in particular produces a happy outcome i do think however that one thing will come out of the g. eight summit and that is that the e b r d the european bank for reconstruction and development will be given a mandate to expand its lending into the north african region i think there's a sort of consensus on that it will give the b.r.d. something to do it it's expensively paid bureaucrats in london will finally have a job and i think that's not a bad thing. well. i think it's good that the b.r.d. is getting involved and maybe it's for the reasons andrew says but i think it's also good for you know it is a positive outcome where we're looking for a positive outcomes and what we seem to be talking about all the time is negativism and cynicism you know the idea of intervening obviously intervening in the overthrow of the most idiotic the iranian president in do the democratically

elected president one hundred fifty three brothers twenty years of stability and it's brought us the mullahs running iran ever since and that's not a good thing overthrowing saddam hussein was obviously not a good thing in a lot of different ways including the supply of oil but this is a different kind of intervention if i may say so you know get our fees go. we're. in the suburbs of benghazi he was talking about rivers of blood he was talking about going door to door and showing no mercy so that isn't and if you if you look at it from a canadian perspective you know obviously the quantity of oil makes a difference on the price but we're also selling oil so that's not such a big problem for us but it's costing us a substantial amount of money to participate in the military activity and we're not doing it for our particular economic interests we're doing it specifically because

there are a lot of people who are going to be slaughtered if they weren't if there wasn't going to there wasn't an intervention or i generally want to know that you want to go i want to go back to g eight ok i still can't understand what humanitarian bombing really means but if i could go to jeff ok let's switch gears guys remember why you're in bombing humanitarian bombing means stopping for his people from killing people all right all right we're going to we're not doing a program on libya we're doing it on the g. eight so if i go to the chair for a day. why don't why don't we just scrap the g. eight and just go g. twenty because that's where you have the other major players there and that's when you can start making global policy that it could be a win win for everybody because the g eight sold out the west and to peripheral countries on it from the west russia and japan ok and why can't it why can't the formats be g twenty where you can actually get things done and i know it's bigger number but maybe more efficient for global problems. well it's a better proxy of the global economy because the the locomotives of global we've

been on the growth are no longer the united states or western europe or japan they're china and india however i don't think by adding another is zero that you're going to get any more harmony or accord i think in fact when you look at china and the united states this is increasingly looking like a zero world it certainly is when it comes to resource consumption and i'm not sure that we're going to be able to get any basic agreement on an fundamental economic a direction and i guess the biggest issue at the g twenty or that g. eight is is how much longer is the people's bank of china going to be willing to finance an over trillion dollar budget deficit because if they step away from the treasury option we just will be talking about a sovereign debt crisis in terms of the so-called pigs but we'll be talking about certainly

a whole new issue of risk in the us treasury market and that's probably going to remain the one fundamental issue is how all that much longer does does communism's last stand one to finance capital isms fallen angel because that's really what's happening right now with the people's bank of china fine during this huge us deficit what do you think about that andrew i mean it's interesting is that you know we can go to different options g two you know just the two main countries and get rid of everyone else or go g twenty but a.g.t. eight this isn't sustainable it's just it's turning into just a club and if a club that really is just a photo op. well i think i think that's true and that's the point i was making at the beginning i think it is important in some sense to as it were sort of feel the feel the heft of somebody is handshake but that's about all that the g eight is called for but you don't actually have to go to a g. two you have to pick up the telephone in there in some sense the idea that you have these big grand international summits is primitive there are perfectly good as we

are demonstrating today video links people can handle bilateral issues bilaterally without putting them into a multilateral forum and without really involving the press and creating all these expectations that the world will change as a result you can have bilateral bilateral discussions between beijing and washington without involving anybody else without creating panic in the markets and one hopes that those discussions are actually going on as for the g. twenty yes the g. twenty is a it's a good shopping x. shopping opportunity for the spouses of the leaders of the countries impulse whether actually very much gets done bishop precisely because there are twenty people there more than that because they're all sorts of international institutions involved twenty six or twenty seven all of whom need feel the need to grandstand so very little comes out of those meetings as well again really they're an opportunity for photos and for handshakes and not but oh and as i say for shopping expeditions

and not much else. i disagree with germany in fact progress profoundly with that. g two would not work for the same reasons that the g eight doesn't work and that is not enough of the major economies would be around the table if you don't have the indians there if you don't have the europeans there you're leaving out a very large amount of sort of international commerce so i think that the reason that they went up rather than down was because they were the second thing is to bear in mind is that the g twenty shouldn't be seen as you guys are now presenting it in the media as something like g eight heavy g twenty is really a process a lot of these things that set in train activities that are going to take a long time to develop you're not going to get a result that every every communique is not going to be you know it's sui generous success in itself these things take time and they take

a lot of time and finally the idea that leaders don't need to get together leaders don't know each other and this is my own experience at least they don't learn to trust each other very much they don't learn to take to understand what each other's issues are. and they begin and it's very easy to demonize people you don't know but when you have them in the room and you're talking to them you can't help but listen and at a certain stage you can either decide that they don't know anything and they really are crazy or actually that they have a point and and that's the way the international system works it actually works more by face to face contact than it does by you know social media jeff in toronto i think there's one thing that you know if you go ahead jump in go ahead a little bit and i listed as one thing. yeah there's one thing that you said there which i do agree with and that is that the g twenty is a process i mean there are no doubt there are several initiatives which are taking place under the g twenty on bella which are important and that will produce results

over time but but if the g twenty didn't exist those same initiatives would have been carried out and let's say the financial stability board i also go the powerful process there are lots and lots of other fora within which international initiatives which are complex and technical can take place not just a few twenty all right jeff i'm trying to i'm going to give you last word should there be a g eight meeting next year you know i'm not sure whether there should or not i put i don't think that that any anybody in the g eight economies are going to be looking for next year's g eight meeting to come up with a solution to their problems i think that kind frees are going to increasingly look within themselves to find their own solutions and that giant global overarching organizations are probably really a remnant of a global economy that's probably ready ready gentlemen we've all run out of time many thanks to my guests today in london toronto and in istanbul and thanks to our

viewers for watching us here on our t.v. see you next time and remember crossfire rules.

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