The G20 owed its existence to an initiative launched in December 1999 by then US Treasury secretary Larry Summers and Canadian prime minister Paul Martin. Their vision was to create a forum for global governance that was more representative than the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, but not so unmanageable as the United Nations. Twenty members seemed like a round number. As the story is told, the list was drawn up by Summers’s assistant, Timothy Geithner (then in charge of international affairs at the Treasury), and Caio Koch-Weser, former managing director at the
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