Policy is a matter for the world, not just a rich club

As the collapse of the trade talks in Geneva in July made clear, there is no longer any   meaningful  trade negotiation without the main nations from the emerging world. The year 2008 may go down in history as the one in which rich countries discovered that this applies to macroeconomic policies, too.
In January it looked as if the opposite lessons could be drawn from events. For a while, Ben Bernanke at the US Federal Reserve and Jean-Claude Trichet at the European Central Bank seemed to be the only relevant policymakers in the world – and they were, as far as liquidity strains were concerned, if only because the US and Europe account for about two-thirds of the global supply of financial assets....