‘The age of national grandstanding is over… or, dude – if you’ve got a problem, walk out!’
Sir Bob Geldof in conversation with Drew Hillier.

Speaking at the G20 London Summit to FX&MM, anti-poverty campaigner, Sir Bob Geldof, was adamant that world leaders had to find a solution to the financial crisis. In the run-up to the G20, Geldof said failure would be catastrophic. However, at the Summit he acknowledged there was a ‘grave understanding’ that this crisis was ‘fundamental and, possibly, existential, for a lot of people on this planet. They <the G20 leaders> must find a way through it. And that the essence of globalisation – which they’ve just discovered – is enforced cooperation.”

There’s a world-weariness in your message, Sir Bob, understandably perhaps…

“sure.”

Do you think, therefore, G20 Summits are not the place to thrash these things out?

“On the contrary, I think they’re the only place. Who cares what we think any more…”

By which you mean?

“Well, what’s interesting is the media focus on Sarkozy, Obama, Brown and that lot… whoever; it’s academic if Sarkozy walks out. Dude, if you’ve got a problem, walk out – who cares! The French national economy against the global one is nothing. And I think we’ve begun to understand that. National grandstanding is over. Or at least it should be. The problem has been that we imagined we’d built a global financial architecture which was benefiting us, but it hadn’t, ‘cos we’d excluded fifty per cent of the globe. And they’re half the world that live on less than two-dollars a day. If you exclude half the actual productive capacity of fifty per cent of the world you have an unstable system; it’s top heavy – it’ll fall over.”

In which case, one of the main areas of agreement coming out of this summit looks like being the IMF’s new SDRs - special drawing rights – which, presumably, will make it easier for developing countries you’re talking about to survive?

“Look, special drawing rights are a sort of arcane economic device. They’ve actually been around for ages; many of us have been saying why don’t they utilise things that are be there to be used? Um, so I’m not sure how this is going to work out. There are lots of mechanisms to fund this thing – I mean, we’ve already seen these completely innovative mechanisms… like quantitative easing for instance. Old words like aid are now called fiscal stimulus. We’ve just given ourselves massive amounts of aid; when we need it, we push buttons and there it is. So when people say, ‘Bob, does aid work?’ Yeah - we’ve just given ourselves trillions of it!”

Semantics aside, the focus really seems to have shifted to the developing world.

“It has to be. The point is – and I think this <G20> is the beginning – trying to work out some new global architecture; but without bringing in the peripheral economies of the world and the people who live in them, we’re not going to get there. Look, probably the great unsung triumphs of the twenty-first century was the lifting of  four-hundred million Chinese people out of extreme poverty through trade. So we must expand. I’m sorry to bore people, but if Africa, for instance, got an injection now, which the World Bank is calling for, of fifty billion US dollars - now don’t forget, Britain gave one company, Lloyds, seventy-five billion quid a couple of weeks ago –  we’re talking about fifty billion from the world to one continent; it’s available. We’ve already committed aid flows… SDRs, IMF gold – it’s available. If we injected that through the African Development Bank into Africa, the return immediately to Britain is seven-hundred-and-fifty billion quid in jobs and exports; two billion to Germany… one-point eight each to China and the U.S.”

Sir Bob concluded that he was “fairly optimistic” the group of world leaders could reach an agreement because “they are”, he said, “serious this time. The G-20 must deliver a future and if they fail to deliver that they shouldn’t have a job themselves.”