President Obama’s meetings with international officials at the G20 summit could result in a raft of new international economic policies and regulations, to judge from remarks made yesterday by an international economic adviser to the president.
Obama will have discussions about how “to implement new regulations globally,” Mike Froman, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, said during a press briefing. “On the regulatory reform side, following up on Dodd-Frank, there’s a number of developments to help internationalize the race to the top on the regulatory reform agenda, and those will be discussed as well,” he added, in a presumably unintentional echo of the slogan for Obama’s education program, Race to the Top.
Froman also indicated that Obama has endorsed a financial transaction tax in conversation with international officials. “[The financial transaction tax] came up in conversations this morning both with President Sarkozy and with Chancellor Merkel,” Froman explained. “And the President made clear that he shares the objectives that Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy have in ensuring that the financial sector contributes an appropriate share to the resolution of crises.” Froman also noted that “the administration has proposed one approach to that through the financial crisis responsibility fee.”
For those of you worried about all this international activity, fear not: Obama intends to follow the bank bailout model. “From two years ago with dealing with the 2008-2009 financial crisis, we have a number of lessons to be learned that we have shared with the Europeans,” Froman said, such as “the fact that the U.S. and the administration acted with overwhelmingly force [sic] in terms of putting up the necessary resources to deal with the crisis; that we insisted on robust stress tests and then insisted that financial institutions dramatically increase — in fact, double their capital.”
He assured reporters that “these are all lessons that are relevant to the current crisis.”
