G20 Summit will Not lead To Bretton Woods II: IMF chief

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London: Warning that the G20 summit next week is unlikely to produce radical change in the way the global economy is governed, the head of IMF said that expectations from the summit are over-hyped.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said that transformation could not take place overnight and world leaders meeting in Washington on November 15 are not going to create a new international treaty.

"Expectations should not be oversold. Things are not going to change overnight. Bretton Woods took two years to prepare. A lot of people are talking about Bretton Woods II," he was quoted as saying by the Financial Times in an interview. "The words sound nice but we are not going to create a new international treaty," he said.

The G20 summit will discuss modalities to reform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was established as part of the Bretton Woods agreement on international financial management signed in 1944.

Earlier French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for overhaul and radical changes in the working of the IMF making it more receptive to current situaion. The EU too called for an overhaul of the IMF with Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, saying, "We want to change the rules of the game."

The IMF head ruled out the possibility of establishment any "early warning system" that could warn about any future financial crsisis as voiced by British Prime MInister Gordon Brown. The US, though, has been more lukewarm on the possibility of radical change.

"I have heard contradictory things about it. I don't think you can have a mechanical system with red lights and green lights and, sometimes country by country, the light goes from green to red," he said. US President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to attend the G20 summit next week.



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