Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The nations represented at the G20 might represent only 10 percent of UN member states and 60 percent of the world’s population, but they were responsible for 80 percent of trade and 85 percent of global GDP and their share was increasing. There was no pretense of equality within the G20, let alone with states beyond. But the members of the G20 did at least recognize one another as elements of the global economic system that were too significant to ignore. At the UN the exclusivity of the G20 provoked something of a countermovement. But when in 2009 the UN General Assembly convened its own committee on the global economic crisis, the G20 ignored it.