wishy washy choppy sloppy, page-27

Frankie

Heads in Washington for G20, looks like they have their agenda already sorted. Good to see they plan on regulating practices in banks across all nations, this is an area where everything became unstuck. It's been reasonably easy for these Wall street smucks to hide the truth in these investment vehicles and overvaluations!

US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson told CNBC television that while the United States had "humiliated" itself in the current crisis, he insisted that "huge imbalances" in capital flows between oil producers, Asian exporters and the United States were also at its root.

He told CNBC television that the summit would be "about putting a process in place to deal" with the imbalances.

"We're going to need a better process to deal with these imbalances so that we don't deal with the same problems or different manifestations of these problems years from now."

Bush has said he wants the summit to focus on issues ranging from improving bank risk management practices, improving accounting rules for securities so that their "true value" is clear, and harmonizing accounting laws among nations.

"All the countries accept the necessity of regulation of the financial system," Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega told reporters. "There could be divergence about the type of regulation.

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso will remind fellow leaders that a key lesson learned from Japan's financial crisis in the 1990s was the need for swift action to address banks' non-performing loans problem, a Japanese official said.

"The first priority is the full disclosure of NPLs and the removal of those troubled assets from their balanced sheets," Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama told reporters in Washington ahead of the talks.

Created in 1999, the Group of 20 (G20) countries account for 85 percent of the world economy and about two-thirds of its population.