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The G20 operates at multiple levels. Several times each year the finance ministers and central bank heads meet to discuss technical issues and try to reach consensus on specific goals and their implementation. The most important meetings, however, are the leaders’ summits, attended by presidents, prime ministers and kings, which meet periodically to discuss global financial issues, with emphasis on the structure of the international monetary system and the need to contain currency wars. It is at these leaders’ summits, both in the formal sessions and informally in the suites, that the actual deals shaping the global financial system are made. Interspersed among the presidents and prime ministers at these meetings is that unique breed of international bureaucrat known as the sherpa. The sherpas are technical experts in international finance who assist the leaders with agendas, research and drafting of the opaque communiqués that follow each confab. All roads toward the resolution of the looming currency wars point in the direction of G20 as the principal forum.

The G20 is well suited to be inclusive of Chinese participation. China often resists compromise in bilateral meetings, viewing requests for concessions as bullying and their assent as a loss of face. This is less of a problem in G20, where multiple agendas are implemented at once. Smaller participants enjoy the chance to have their voices heard in G20 because they lack the leverage to move markets on their own. The United States benefits from having its allies in the room and avoids charges of acting unilaterally. So the advantages of G20 to all parties are apparent.

President George W. Bush and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France were instrumental in changing the G20 from merely a finance ministers’ meeting, which it had been since its beginning in 1999, to a leaders’ meeting, which it has been since 2008. In the immediate aftermath of the Lehman Brothers and AIG collapses in September 2008, attention turned to a previously scheduled G20 meeting of finance ministers in November. The Panic of 2008 was one of the greatest financial catastrophes in history and the role of China as one of the largest investors in the world and a potential source of rescue capital was undeniable. At the time, the G7 was the leading forum for economic coordination, but China was not in the G7. In effect, Sarkozy and Bush reenacted the scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider, after seeing the shark for the first time, says to Robert Shaw, “We’re gonna’ need a bigger boat.” Politically and financially, G20 is a much bigger boat than G7.

In November 2008, President Bush convened the G20 Leaders’ Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, at which every president, prime minister, chancellor or king of a member country was present. Instantly the G20 morphed from a finance ministers’ technical session to a gathering of the most powerful leaders in the world. Unlike various regional summits, every corner of the globe had its representatives and, unlike the UN General Assembly, everyone was in the room at the same time.

Based on the urgency of the financial crisis and the ambitious agenda laid down by the G20 in November 2008, the leaders’ summits continued through four more meetings over the course of 2009 and 2010. For 2011, the G20 leaders decided to hold a single meeting in Cannes, France, in November. This sequence of summits was the closest thing the world had ever seen to a global board of directors, and it seemed here to stay.

The G20 is perfectly suited to U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner’s modus operandi, which he calls “convening power.” Author David Rothkopf brought this concept to light in a highly revealing interview he conducted with Geithner for his book Superclass, about the mores of the global power elite. When he was president of the New York Fed in 2006, Geithner told Rothkopf:

We have a convening power here that is separate from the formal authority of our institution.... I think the premise going