The Price Of Failure

The G7 meeting this weekend has been a complete bust. Germany and France are scrambling to save themselves, and the IMF is now publicly warning of global systemic meltdown.

The IMF warned on Saturday that the global financial system was on the brink of meltdown, while France and Germany pushed ahead with a pan-European crisis response to try to prevent the worst global downturn in decades.

At a joint news conference, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said they had "prepared a certain number of decisions" to present at a Sunday meeting of European leaders as they work feverishly to restore blocked credit markets to working order.

The United States appealed for patience, but the International Monetary Fund stressed that time was running short after leading industrialized nations failed to agree on concrete measures to end the crisis at a meeting on Friday.

"Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest U.S.-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown," IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

It's the last hurrah and the world is burning.

I expect by the time the G7 decides to act in concert after another 20% loss worldwide in stocks, maybe something will happen that will prompt the kind of international action needed. It won't matter much by then I'm thinking, but hey. I'm sure it'll be okay, right?