G20 glossary: deciphering alphabet soup of the communique

By Cho Jin-seo

G20
Group of 20. This is a meeting of 19 nations with large economies plus the European Union.
The G20 mostly deals with economic issues. It is considered as an expansion of the G8, the group of eight economically advanced nations in the West plus Russia, into a more comprehensive group of advanced and large emerging nations such as China and Brazil. Iran, Taiwan and Venezuela are not G20 members even though they have bigger GDPs than South Africa, a member.

Sherpa
Sherpas are the Himalayan people who are employed as guides for mountaineers, but at the G20 this refers to the official in charge of negotiations at working-group meetings. A sherpa is a deputy for the national leader and the finance minister. South Korea's sherpa is Rhee Chang-yong, formerly vice chairman of the Financial Services Commission.

Communique
The communique is a joint statement, produced as the final result of each meeting. Each member nation is morally encouraged to follow the agreed instruction on this statement, but this does not it has any legal binding.
Writing a communique is a painfully long and complicated multilateral negotiation process. This often takes it up to the final minute of a summit.
June's Toronto Summit produced a 27-page communique. We can expect a longer one from that in Seoul.

Secretariat
The G20 does not have a fixed office or administrative body. So for every summit, the host country assumes the role of chairman and mediator. Korea, the current host, and France, the next in line, want to make a permanent secretariat.

Financial Crisis
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the U.S. investment bank, in September 2008 caused a global panic in financial markets. This prompted nations to upgrade the G20 from a ministers' meeting to a summit of national leaders, so that it can take joint action. The crisis affected many countries, so the agenda of future G20 summits is to be more focused on establishing a more sound global financial system and a more stable global economic growth platform.

Global imbalance
Countries like China accumulate large amounts of dollar reserves as they have surpluses from international trade. Others like the United States have chronic deficits as they buy more goods than they sell. While this merely reflects the economic strength of the nations in the long term, the G20 wants to mitigate this imbalance for the short term by using a variety of policy tools such as currency exchange rates.

Currency war, and 'market-determined exchange rate'
A country can be tempted to control its currency exchange rate so that its goods are sold at cheaper prices than goods from rival countries. Because of domestic politics in countries, this can spark a futile competition of devaluing currencies amongst them.
The G20 agreed to not allow this to happen at the Gyeongju Finance Ministers' meeting last month, by leaving their currencies traded at “market-determined” rates. This is a tighter definition than “market-oriented,” which had previously been used by the G20. But it is not clear how countries such as China, which controls its currency rate, will interpret this phrase.

Current account balance
At Gyeongju last month, Korea and the United States suggested a 4-percent cap on current account surpluses or deficits for each nation. The current account is the sum of a nation's balance of trade (import and export) and interest and dividend incomes. To control the current account balance is mainly about controlling the volume of exports and imports. Countries with large surpluses, such as Germany, are not very happy with this proposal.

Basel III
Basel III is a newly introduced set of regulatory codes on banks and other financial institutions. The draft of Basel III is ready to be endorsed by the G20 leaders at the Seoul Summit. It is drawn up by the Basel Committee of Banking Supervision (BCBS), a group of central bank governors.
The gist of Basel III is to require banks to have more capital on their balance sheets and more reserve money in their safes, so they can better cope with future financial crises. It is a successor to the Basel I and Basel II codes but is much tougher than the two predecessors.
The Basel Committee is called so, because its meetings are held in the Swiss town of Basel (population: 166,000).

FSB
The Financial Stability Board is a group of central bank governors and financial regulators of the G20 countries and some others. Its aim is to monitor the global financial system and make recommendations. The G20 commissioned the FSB after the 2009 London Summit. Its members are largely overlapping with the BCBS (above).

SIFIs
These are significantly important financial institutions, which are informally called “too-big-to-fail” (TBTF) banks. The U.S. government had to spend taxpayers' money in saving the insurance firm AIG during the crisis, because it was worried about the ripple effect on the whole economy. The G20 and the FSB want to set up stricter guidelines for these big firms.

OTC derivatives
OTC means “over-the-counter.” These are complex financial products that are traded between financial firms face-to-face, or over the phone, or over the Internet without going through a central clearing house such as the stock exchange.
The G20 and the FSB suspect that these untraceable trades have exacerbated “herd behavior” in the financial market, so they want this to be monitored in the future.

Framework for Strong, Sustainable, Balanced Growth
Simply the “Framework,” the G20 plans to produce a collection of policy recommendations for each member nation at the Seoul Summit, so they can create synergy for the global economy. The Framework refers to this coordinated effort. The currency war (above) and current account balances are all part of this discussion.

MAP
To produce the Framework, each nation has to fill in a question sheet on monetary and fiscal policies called the Mutual Assessment Process. The sheets are then cross-checked by all other nations for consistency and viability. To be included in the final statement of the Seoul Summit, all nations have to approve the Framework.

IMF
The International Monetary Fund monitors the global economy and it lends money to countries in financial trouble, sometimes with severe conditions (as it did with Asian countries in 1998) and sometimes without severe conditions (as with European countries in 2010). It has been dominated by Europe and the United States. The G20 wants to reform its governance structure. They have already agreed on specific plans to shift some of the power from advanced to emerging countries.

IMF quota
Major decisions at the IMF are supposed to be made by votes. Nations get votes roughly in proportion with their financial contribution to it. Most nations are eager to make more down payments to the IMF so they can get more voting power. As a result of the ongoing reform, China will have the third largest votes after the United States and Japan by 2012. But the United States alone has more than 15 percent of the quota, which is the minimum to have a veto.

Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN)
Emerging economies are deeply concerned that the volatile wave of cross-border money flow is sometimes too large to handle _ foreign investors withdraw money from emerging countries too fast when things look bad. This large volatility of speculative capital flow has caused foreign exchange crises in many countries in Asia, South America and Europe. The G20 is working on setting up a firewall called the Global Financial Safety Net against this volatility.
One measure is to enlarge the IMF's role in providing emergency capital to countries. It has made its Flexible Credit Line (FCL) much more approachable to emerging economies. It also introduced a Precautionary Credit Line, which is to be provided for countries with low credit.

Kim Yuna, Han Hyo-ju, Park Ji-sung
Kim Yuna is the Olympic Gold Medal figure skater, and Han Hyo-ju is an actress. They can be found smiling on the giant 100-meter wide poster on the wall of Seoul City Hall. Park Ji-sung is a Manchester United football player who is also lending his name to the G20 preparation committee for PR.

Coex
The Convention and Exhibition Center is the venue of the G20 Seoul Summit. It houses a multiplex theater, an aquarium, casino, department store, underground mall and a couple of five-star hotels.
It is connected to Samsung subway station, which will be closed during the summit. So the participants will be carried in and out of the complex either by limos (for national leaders and other VIPs) and by shuttle bus (non-VIPs and, uhm, journalists) from nearby stations.