The semiannual meetings of the world’s top finance and banking officials are predictable in one sense: Europeans and Americans often use them to lecture leaders of poor countries about the need to modernize their capital markets, promote transparency and adhere to sound investment standards.
What a difference a subprime mortgage crisis can make. Now developing countries are lecturing the West.
With hundreds of officials and experts convening over the weekend in the nation’s capital, the theme this year was not fear of protesters, but of the global impact of the troubles in the American housing sector, with many delegates faulting lax regulations and sleepy overseers in Europe and the United States.
“Allow me to point out the irony of this situation,” Guido Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister, told reporters, contending that the “countries that were references of good governance, of standards and codes for the financial systems” were now the same countries where financial problems were threatening to wreck global prosperity.
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