Let's Can the G20 Summit and Just Email Each Other

Here’s the electrifying agreement the G20 reached in Seoul: They vowed to create guidelines for rectifying trade imbalances—by the next G20 meeting. “Thank you, Baby Jesus, for this smoking hot procrastination,” writes Tunku Varadarajan in the Daily Beast. Basically, it was the same old story: China and Germany want to keep the dollar high so we’ll buy things from them. “And we’d like somebody—anybody—to buy things from us, but we only make the McRib sandwich, and that, too, for a limited time.”

In truth, nobody has a solution for the imbalances between the mercantalist-producers and the binge-consumers. “How do you stop Americans from being cheeseburger-eating foreclosure monkeys (as the French might put it)? How do you get Chinese people to consume more and save less without unraveling thousands of years of ingrained Confucian reflex?” No one knows. Everyone’s just sitting around hoping the US economy improves, and acts as a rising tide for all ships. “So… couldn’t they have just hashed that out over email?” (More G20 stories.)