Check out this headline: G20 to seek progress on world growth scheme. I’m going to break it down before I even get into the ramifications of what it means and/or the brewing belly-rant that it catalyzes in my cynical, liberal soul.

1.    G20: It’s a group of 20 finance ministers from the largest economies in the world, started in 1999. They are effectively taking over for the G8. These 20 people are in charge of economies that make up 85% of the world GDP.

2.    Progress: In the economic world, progress means efficient and profitable growth- not making things better or beneficial or more fair or anything weird like that, just making things work so people can make money.

3.    World Growth: That means, how do these 20 economies keep their positions and make more money.

4.    Scheme: This doesn’t mean crooked, scheme just means plan.
Essentially, all of the caretakers of the largest economies in the world are sitting down to figure out how to make it so their countries start being profitable again.

We don’t even need Orwell anymore- it’s on the front page of the newspaper, the lead line of the blogs, it’s not even going to get anyone to bat an eye. To be fair, these ministers also represent 2/3 of the world population, so this is not a straight-up tiny group of countries trying to control the rest, but how many people in these countries are benefitting from their GDP? Who will these finance ministers be looking to benefit? What is their goal?

That’s the key question to ask- what is the goal of the G20?

According to wikipedia, its focus is to “Bring together systemically important industrialized and developing economies to discuss key issues in the global economy.”

It’s like global assimilation into the world economic theory. Reuters writes that the meeting this week will “…seek to firm up a plan to rebalance the world economy when they meet this week, looking to beat out how to set national policy goals and make sure everyone keeps to them…”

It’s classic teambuilding, yes, let’s get everyone on the same page, establish goals and get everyone moving in the same direction with some accountability- but this is frightening for the world economy. These are not business owners doing this- these are governments. Getting together and mapping out economic goals. Then figuring out policies to make them happen. Essentially, this is business planning by elected officials from all over the world.

The jist of the meeting’s goals are to reset currency imbalances and set collective policy goals- if there is an organization that is going to come up with a world currency and an economic governing body, this is it.

It’s doubtful that everyone will be able to agree on anything specific, as in numbers, when they  are developing short or mid-term goals, and readjusting currencies is a pretty contentious issue. What is sure to come up is China’s cheap exports, excessive but now essential U.S. consumer spending, and perhaps even the EU’s low rate of consumption, according to Reuters.

Sounds like the EU is not a problem, sounds like the U.S. is the problem and China is the savvy business. We’ll see if that’s how it goes down later this week.