The world financial crisis has served as a quick and efficient catalyst to the G-20. The first three G-20 summits of chiefs of state, in Washington, London, and Pittsburgh, will be remembered for advancing multilateralism and coordinated global action. But the G-20 remains very much a work in progress – and one that needs much work to succeed, as its most recent summit in Toronto demonstrated.

The G-20 summit in Washington in 2008 was the first at which the member countries’ chiefs of state met since the group’s creation in 1997. The G-8 was no longer an appropriate vehicle for global economic governance, given the need to stabilize financial markets around the

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Vince Cable's speech today