‘Glimmers of stabilisation’ from the G20 and perhaps even from the real economy

If 2 April, the day of the G20 London summit, eventually goes down in history as the day the global economy took a turn for the better, it would be ungracious to deny some credit to the statesmanship of Barack Obama and the sheer determination of Gordon Brown.

We were encouraged by pre-conference spin not to expect much by way of an outcome, so that the figure of $1.1 trillion of new – or rather, nearly new and vaguely pledged – funding for the IMF and global trade, came as a deliberate, headline-grabbing surprise. There were loose ends, there was silly grandstanding by Nicolas Sarkozy, there was no action urgently to counter the surge of job losses and bankruptcies across the industrial world, but still this coming together of world leaders was hailed as a positive step.

And if it doesn’t save Brown’s bacon at the next general election, it will surely enhance the way he will be judged by historians. For once, in this respect, luck was on his side. The summit on which he staked his name coincided with a moment when it was just possible to identify distant signs of a recovery – that will happen despite gross errors of economic management by Brown and his fellow leaders in recent years.

Are we deluded to talk of recovery when news from the real economy seems so unremittingly bleak? Out there in battered stock and commodity markets, in factories on short-time working, on housing estates where no houses have sold in months, there are whispers of a change in the wind. We may not be at the bottom of the recession, but we might be getting close to it. At the very least, there are signs of deceleration in the rate at which things are getting worse – what President Obama has carefully called ‘glimmers of stabilisation’.

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