French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised an "ambitious and humble" year as leader of the Group of 20 rich and developing economies, and he has a lot to be humble about, argues Associated Press business writer Greg Keller in an analysis piece ahead of the weeken G-20 meeting.
Despite a warning earlier this year from Christine Lagarde - then his finance minister, now IMF chief - that a failure to address global imbalances would "lead us straight into the wall of another debt crisis," that is exactly where the G-20 has wound up.
Now the finance ministers and central bankers gathering for two days of talks here beginning Friday must explain how they let the global economy run straight towards the edge of a clearly marked cliff - and what they can still do to stop it from falling over it.
It was only last February, when the mandarins of finance last met in Paris, that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said "The global economy - by almost every measure - is in the best shape it's been in at any time in the last two or three years."
"I think there is justifiable, growing confidence," he said.
Whoops.
Finance officials from Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere will now be treated to the spectacle of their European counterparts promising to do "whatever it takes" to avert a collapse of the common euro currency.
European leaders have asked for more time to figure out how they'll achieve that. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel now say such a plan will be ready before the G-20 leaders' summit in Cannes in early November, possibly by the time of an EU summit October 23.
That will be too late to give finance ministers and central bankers meeting in Paris something substantial to announce. An official at the French Finance Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, in fact appeared to characterize this weekend's meeting as just prep for the EU summit.
Sarkozy saw the danger of inaction last March, and pledged to avoid it. In March at a summit in Nanjing, China, he said that "now that the crisis is past" it was imperative that leaders press on with reforms or else "the world will slide inexorably back into instability and crisis."
That foresight was unmatched by execution, however, and the consequences for the global economy are painful - Europe's sovereign debt crisis threatens to plunge the world back into a recession that some predict could be worse than that of 2008.
It all looked so different last November, when Sarkozy took the mantle of G-20 leadership at a summit hosted by last year's president, South Korea. Then, Sarkozy said France's ambition was for "everyone to accept to sit down at the table to set up the basis for a new system that will guarantee the world's stability."
Read more of this story from AP.