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When Barack Obama came to Elkhart, Indiana in February it was Ed Neufeldt who introduced him. "We want to work," Ed told Obama, who embraced him warmly.

The big, genial 62-year old used to build the motor caravans Americans call RVs, and Elkhart is the capital of the RV industry. But when credit dried up the RV industry collapsed. Ed's been out of work since September, after 32 years in the industry - 27 of them without a single day's sickness, he tells me proudly.

Back then, in February, Obama's main problem seemed to be the Congressional Republicans, who were blocking and tinkering with his fiscal stimulus Bill. Now things seem more complicated. The fiscal stimulus is taking a long time to kick in, and the very principle of it is deeply resented by men like Ed, even though he will benefit from it in unemployment pay and health insurance payments.

100 days into the Obama presidency I found Ed and his former colleagues hard at work building timber-frame homes for homeless families. It's a church-run project - they work for nothing. What they share with Obama, these men, is a deep religious faith. On almost everything else their attitudes reveal that this is not really Obama country.

"We want them to get out of the way and let us work," one tells me. Them being the government. "We don't want to be construction workers: what are we going to do? Be the man that holds the sign saying stop-go? We're not trained for anything else!"

To these men - as for many Republican politicians - spending taxpayers money to get out of a recession seems wrong on principle. In Indiana the Republican governor has at least taken it - others, , have refused the money. But if it's to be spent at all they would have preferred it as tax cuts or simple cash giveaways. What the Elkhart men want is for Americans to start buying RVs again, not for the government to put them to work on building roads.

Of course that is only half the story of America; as we found out in the election it is, precisely, just under half. The other half of America bought the argument that state intervention, an end to "trickle-down" economics could put the country right. But even in this demographic there is trouble.

A few days after I visited Elkhart I found myself being pinned against the walls at a trendy book publishing party in Brooklyn by student activists who think Obama is just a sell out. Virtually everybody politically active on the liberal wing of the Democrats is involved in a perpetual one-note riff on the theme of Obama's timidity; his "capture" by Clinton-era machine politicians and Wall Street. " was Arianna Huffington's memorable headline on her balance sheet of the first 100 days.

Among mainstream political journalists there is a certain insouciance about all this: if politics is just elections and polls, then Obama is flying high. His approval rating is good, he's just recruited a Republican senator, taking him close to the tipping point where he can get his laws through Congress with ease. But I can't help recalling what happened with the TARP in September.

Paulson's bank bailout plan enraged right wing, small town America - and that rage coincided with the rage of the liberal left. Both saw the bailout as wrong in principle, both pressured their representatives. The result was the final few weeks of the Bush administration found it trapped between left and right wing plebeian rage.

There is no rage right now - the tax tea parties were stunts organized by a Republican base layer whose top political leaders remain disoriented. But give it time. Ed and his colleages were mainly laid off last September. Six months unemployment, plus two Federally funded extensions, should take them to September 09. "That's when the rubber meets the road," says Ed. "People will lose their cars, their vehicles."

Meanwhile we have not yet seen the full shape of Geithner's bank bailout. While in Britain the failing banks were sternly ordered to take state money, and the government took a massive stake (if not control), in the USA there is still something of a going on between Geithner and Wall Street; the banks are determined not to be recapitalized by the state, not to give up a major stake and have lobbied hard to make sure the coming bailout deal is highly favourable to them.

Not a day goes by without the leader writers and senior op-ed people at the New York Times, HuffPo, etc denouncing this as treachery and pronouncing that it will fail. We'll see: at my Brooklyn party there were also plenty of people prepared to believe that Obama is planning an unannounced coup against the banks that will leave Citigroup and Bank of America partially nationalized.

The nightmare for Obama is: what if the fiscal stimulus fails to deliver, while simultaneously enraging the small-town conservatives; meanwhile the bank bailout delivers only to the Wall Street elite, simultaneously enraging the urban left. And what if this coincides with Ed and his mates having their dole cut off, and my student radicals and their mates entering the jobs market to find there are no more jobs in Starbucks?

100 days is too soon to judge any presidency, certainly on the economic front. But America's media and civil society is alive with "Plan B" discussions. Many Republican governors are quietly implementing a Plan B version of the stimulus, allocating money to projects that reflect their own political and economic philosophies. In the pages of the New York Times its more overt: from , Stiglitz and Robert Reich you have a daily dose of advice to Obama to cauterize the banking losses, spend the stimulus money faster, and just generally to get on with it.

Tune into Newsnight, live from Chicago, to see my report on the fiscal stimulus and hear a stellar cast of commentators and politicos battle it out. Tonight at 2230 GMT.

In the kerfuffle of Budget Day, followed by the Death of New Labour and the Death of Nice Conservatism, Man United's win over Portsmouth, the IFS predator strike on Alistair Darling and Susan Boyle's makeover I forgot to congratulate Jack Night, whose blog deservedly beat Idle Scrawl to the . I was tipping him to win and wish now that I had backed him. The Orwell Prize people have not yet supplied an "Orwell Prize: Loser" jpeg to go on this blog so the old one will stay there till the tech team can take it down.

Jack is a working police detective. Night Jack's value lies in the truthfulness of what's described and the honesty with which the author confronts his own reaction to events. Leaving aside "turning writing into an art" that is the essence of what Orwell did in books like Homage to Catalonia and Road to Wigan Pier. Jack uses concepts that could never appear on a mainsteam media-hosted blog, such as and he does not spare us from the mundanity, squalor and pointlessness of most crime, and allows us to understand better its complex causes.

He's suspended the blog to write a novel. I hope, amid the wrecked lives and chip wrappers, he finds time to read Chandler's . Chandler advises detective fiction writers to create, as hero, "a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid"; ie, not a .

Some thoughts on the UK budget...

1. This is a multi-layered story where the econo-wonk press gets the biggest issue - which is fiscal credibility - and the politico-press is going, quite understandably, for the more easily "relevant" story of labour's U-turn on the higher 50% tax rate. (We'll be doing both tonight on Newsnight).

2. There is a slight but serious chance that the bond markets will go on strike and not buy the UK's £220bn debt. A lot of bond traders are going on the airwaves to say they probably will buy it, albeit at a higher interest rate. But bond traders are Spock-like beings who play 3D chess at one-move-a-day-pace. The ones not talking to the press are the ones thinking about putting the on Darling.

3. A quick explanation of gilts: gilts are IOUs issued by the government over periods of 5, 10, 30, and 50 years and bring a guaranteed interest payment for the buyer, paid every six months. Two thirds are held by pension funds, as they supply a ready and predictable source of income. Once issued gilts can be traded, so their price can go up or down compared to the interest rate guaranteed. Out of this relationship you get a yield - which is a bit like a "real" interest rate. If the price of gilts goes down, because there's not enough demand, the yield goes up - and the government effectively ends up paying a higher interest rate on its debt. (Pile in ye pedants and diss me on the detail, but I think this is the best simple explanation I can give).(Guido gives a useful graph of the forward price of gilts).

4. OK so if the markets don't believe the government's 3.5% growth prediction for 2011 they will start pushing the yield upwards (and the price downwards). The yield on a 10 year Treasury Gilt () is currently 3.45% (you can see it each day at the bottom of the front page of the FT's companies and markets page).

5. The aim of the government's quantitative easing strategy is to get the yield down. The Bank of England is buying up gilts to push yields down. But the fears over the UK budget deficit will push yields up. They have already started to creep up in response to the credibility fears we covered on Newsnight last night. Gillian Tett on default risk in general.

6. So, yes, you have worked it out right: the lack of credibility on economic forecasting and debt is working directly opposite to the £150bn being printed by the Bank of England to do quantitative easing.

7. How will it end? Well what the bond markets typically fear is two things a) a default, where Britain refuses to pay its debt. This right now is a theoretical impossibility. And b) inflation - where the government allows inflation to inflate away all that interest over the 10,20 or 50 year life of the bond, leaving the bondholder as sad as a 1923 with his wheelbarrow full of worthless notes.

8. This article explains in the bond market right now. But the canny traders are looking ahead to the November PBR. If there is no election before then, and he does not get reshuffled, Alistair Darling will have to stand up and say whether the 3.5% prediction is right. Indeed since he predicted growth to begin in Q3 2009 he will have a good idea whether he's going to be proved right or wrong. If we are then faced with a further upward revision of debt, a further downward revision of growth, then he hole in the finances will look bigger and the tax take will have to increase even further. Senior Tories believe this will have to be done by raising VAT, as the government was caught discussing in a recent leak.

9. We will know by November whether yesterday's figures were over-optimistic. Sometime between now and then the debt rating agencies will have a look at the UK's public finances and decide whether it keeps its AAA (zero chance of default) rating. See for why they are already considering a downgrade.

10. Finally the I has just said that total government spending will be cut by 0.1% a year in real terms, between 2011-2014, the lowest three-year spending growth for any government since 1996-1999.

The IMF Global Financial Stability Report, issued yesterday, was always going to have a top-line horror story on toxic debt. Instead of a $2 trillion write off the world is facing a $4 trillion write off. Fingers hovering above the keyboard and fighting off jet lag I was preparing to wade through this to see if they could put a figure on the UK's toxic debt bill.

The Treasury was "not steering us away" from the FT's proposed price tag of £60bn - although indicating that this was "cautious" ie high and even musing privately that Britain would not lose any money at all on its bank bailout insurance scheme.

The Conservatives, acting fast, found the number and did the sums. 13.4% of Britain's GDP would be needed to cover the fiscal cost of the bailouts. That's £200bn said the Tories and hit the airwaves.

There was a slight problem: these were not like for like figures. The IMF's figure included not just losses on insuring toxic debt, but also actions like Northern Rock and even proposed losses on Bank of England operations to shore up the credit markets.

However that did not invalidate the Tories' point. The £200bn figure is a massive hit to the UK taxpayer, much bigger than the coy briefings received by the FT and pretty annoying if you are a taxpayer. That was the story at 5pm as we finished filming our Newsnight pre-budget piece.

At 9pm I finally got the Treasury to respond to the Conservatives' press release and the IMF report. The figure is wrong, they told me. They had raised this with the IMF and the IMF would be withdrawing the figure. It should be in a range between 6-13% of GDP said the Treasury. The word "bonkers" came up in the conversation, I seem to remember.

I phoned the IMF. They tried to put me through to an economist dealing with the case but nobody ever returned my voicemail request for clarification. I started hitting the refresh button on the PDF file of the report and, lo, at around 9.45 pm, discovered that it was still there but with the relevant table missing and covered by the words "Under Embargo". Now embargo is a term for holding back information you have not yet released, not withdrawing information you have already released. This latter is called a U-turn not an embargo, or as they say in Private Eye, a reverse-ferret.

The IMF's new version of the report (, the erroneous original has disappeared into that memory tube Winston Smith uses in Nineteen Eighty Four) states that the cost will be 9.1% of GDP will be needed to cover bailouts, which is apparently £130bn. But weirdly the new list of countries mentioned is shorter than the old one. And Britain's figure is not "in a range" between 6-13% but almost exactly halfway along that range.

So maybe there is an interesting explanation of why the original list got made, why it was so much worse for the UK, why Ireland was on it and is now not on it, and why it got pulled. Unfortunately I do not have time to find out because it is Budget Day. There you go.

Hard on the heels of Guido's triumph over McBridegate, a US blogger claims to have received the .

The test, which is for solvency, is alleged to have found that many of the banks are technically insolvent and could not survive a further downturn, and indeed that if two went down it would wipe out the remaining funds of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is being used to provide a credit line to Wall Street.

I'm in the USA at present, getting ready for the red-eye to come back and report the UK budget. The US Treasury has denied the leak, and the blogger's own website contains highly unsavoury language (you can click on the Bloomberg link above to find it but I'm not linking direct from here).

However in Manhattan there are a lot of people who give credence to the idea that Obama will be forced to nationalize a part of the banking sector, and that a surreptitious "Plan B" is being assembled by writers for the New York times, including its Nobel Laureate economics guru Paul Krugman, and Obama advisers.

The Plan B, goes the theory, would have to be sprung as a surprise to avoid an Alistair Darling-style run on the ailing banks. It would have to involve a second tranche of fiscal stimulus and possibly some more decisive move towards the classic quantitative easing strategy being adopted by the Bank of England.

All this, as I've pointed out before, will not be popular with that whole part of America which suspects any role for the state in the economy leads to socialism. However they are currently up in arms about taxpayer dollars being used to bail out Wall Street, and when the terms of any bailout become finalized, it will doubtless enrage them even more.

So Obama finds himself potentially trapped in the same way Bush and Paulson were: between a resurgent liberal left wing calling for decisive state intervention and a rightwing plebeian base calling for any bailout to be at the expense of the bankers not the taxpayer: since Bernanke, Geithner and Obama are committed to paying over the odds for the toxic debt, their current plan ensures the taxpayer loses.

It's worth recalling what happened the first time around: the right wing protest paralysed congress for a crucial week in which the financial system headed towards meltdown; then the left ensured the TARP was passed with so many conditions it couldn't meet its original purpose and was abandoned.

The "Plan B" theory would be just liberal Democrat fantasy if it were not for one salient fact: the Obama administration is, five months after his election and three months into the presidency, quite unformed. There is no under-secretary for domestic finance. More important there is a lack of narrative about what they are doing with the banks. Every day seems to bring a new tweak or announcement.

Brad DeLong (sometime Newsnight interlocutor) in his speculates on three reasons for this a) the banks have us by the "plums" as Brad graphically puts it b) the government will actually make money but it relies on letting the bankers get rich from the bailout plan c) the bailout plan is just a going through the motions exercise before the banks are nationalized in September.

This is just speculation of course I can tell you from my stay here there is tangible and rising frustration with Obama's statism, which is not just being fuelled by Fox News but which comes from deep within the US psyche and even from people who approve of the president himself.

Meanwhile most of the liberal, Democrat, New York Times reading types I have met will readily agree with that Obama is close to losing the plot on the banks. To the rest of the world of course he is a saint, (including as I at the New Year, for the rapprochement with Cuba/Venezuela). But here there is political stasis and a lot of media friction.

The IMF has released parts 3 and 4 of its , while we have to wait for part 1 and 2.

Presumably, as with The Godfather, the are the better and so they have punted them now into the pdf-osphere to try and, once again, bounce the world's finance ministers at the IMF Spring Meeting to commit to sustained fiscal stimulus.

Why do they think it's needed? Well the rationale is summed up in the opening paragraph of Chapter 3, which I will summarise in bullet point form in non-financial English.

1. Recessions caused by financial crisis are unusually severe and long
2. Globally synchronised recessions are long and deep and the recoveries weak
3. Interest rate cuts and printing money can help but are limited when the main problem is financial
4. By contrast fiscal stimulus is "particularly effective"
5. However strike point 4 above if countries are already heavily indebted (NB Gordon Brown)
6. Therefore the current recession is likely to be "unusually long and severe and the recovery sluggish".

Now the politics. What Dominique Strauss-Kahn is trying to do here is bounce the US government, and one or two others, into sorting the banks out. On Newsnight tonight he was clear that the US banking bailout is not effective and it's clear the IMF is trying to lean on the US Treasury and Fed to achieve some kind of closure ().

Here in the USA, (I have been travelling around Indiana in an RV), the fiscal stimulus is facing a growing backlash, even from people who've benefited from it. The "tax tea parties" though small have been heavily covered by Fox News - and I mean like on the scale of a Cat 6 Hurricane. Many conservative Americans have the gut feeling that Obama's fiscal stimulus will impose a tax burden on their kids that will change America forever.

Strauss-Kahn took a coded sideswipe at the tax protesters, the Republicans and by implication the British Conservatives in his Newsnight interview: opposition parties he said are making hay out of the stimulus - but it happens. Under his leadership the IMF is turning out to be strangely dirigiste, doom-laden and prepared to kick the butt of sovereign governments and opposition politicians behind the scenes.

One thing I think we can predict with certainty is that, when the IMF publishes its growth projections next week, they will be even lower than the already thrice downgraded figures. If, as DS-K said, we're looking at a mid-2010 recovery, 2009 is looking pretty grim, and in jobs and closures and output we've not seen nearly the bottom yet.

I'm in the USA making a report about the first 100 days of the Obama administration, and its impact on the economy. I flew to Chicago O'Hare airport on Easter Sunday and am writing this at the Chicago O'Hare branch of a famous business hotel chain. On this trip I'm going to write about my impressions of how the economy is doing but I have to say this particular impression is too off-scale to have any relevance.

The hotel is nearly empty. The swimming pool is a mess of concrete and do not enter signs. I was the only person in the restaurant and the only person at the bar. I have just breakfasted on froot loops and stale toast ($12.50). Apart from that, I do not know what pays the wages of the largely migrant workforce here. They seem incredibly cheerful amid the 1970s-era mushroom coloured decor, piped jazz and pile carpet gloom.

What difference has Obama made? That's what I asked the barmaid. She told me a classic American dream story: came to Chicago from Morocco. Studied accountancy but has given up halfway through her degree. Went on a student protest against the Iraq war and was surprised to find herself treated like an enemy of the people by SWAT teams. Will never go on a protest again. Thinks Obama has made a difference just because of the mood music he's created. Described Michelle Obama's visit to a North London school in great detail. Irrepressibly optimistic. The economy is bouncing back. Using her hands she demonstrates it's fallen fast but has hit some kind of bounce point, which has reassured people it's not going to go "there" - she indicates the shape of a Depression.

This, as it turns out is the big debating point among US economists - with the NYT's and the perennially pessimistic Nouriel Roubini both saying basically as follows: the fiscal stimulus is too little, because it's predictated on an over-optimistic reading of employment figures. Meanwhile the bank bailout scheme, currently undergoing stress testing, is built to fail and will shovel large amounts of money from the taxpayers to the banks, leaving them unreformed. Both economists think there is a danger that not only the USA but the global economy will go "there", Krugman suggesting that we are at the .

I always wanted to visit Chicago but it turns out that on this trip I will not really be going further than O'Hare. My next stop is Gary, Indiana. The old steel town is famous as a song title in the Robert Preston musical "" - though in real life think with no happy endings.

I've been thinking the Music Man currently a decent metaphor for Obama: in the film Robert Preston's con man makes everybody feel better just by ordering new uniforms and instruments for the band, even though nobody can actually play them and they are not intended to arrive. The magic in the film is, of course, that the con turns out to be real; from somewhere - nobody knows - uniforms, instruments and the full 76 Trombones turn up. The irrepressible chutzpah of the hero makes it happen. This is the ultimate tenor of the barmaid's perspectives on the Presidency: it feels better so it will get better.

I'm off now to pick up Newsnight's "recreational vehicle". Me and my crew are officially becoming trailer trash on this trip - a kind of lumpenproletarian parallel to Ethical Man Does America.

If you read the London Summit , issued at 1600GMT you will find:

"The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information."

But by 2130GMT last night it had not been published. And then at 2131 it was.

This list was long fought for by , because the intention was to include on it some European countries who, while not exactly in the same league as other Bond-film destinations, such as Grand Cayman, have not completely conformed to OECD norms. Thus Belgium and Austria are on it, as of course is Switzerland, albeit on a "grey part" of the list entitled "other countries".

Now Newsnight is, as always, keen to provide full and timely public service to those who need to stash the proceeds of drug dealing, dictatorship and arms-company lobbying. So we wanted to publish the list. Where was it?

My producer phoned the OECD at 1800.

"Watch the website we can't say anymore than that".

I phoned Downing Street at 2050.

"It's not for us to publish, it's for the OECD" said an apologetic press officer.

"But it means the communique is wrong," I protested. "Talk to the OECD," was the answer.

Thanks to some we now know what happened.

On Wednesday night there were frosty negotiations between France and China over the inclusion of Macau, which got mixed up with France deciding to moderate its criticism of the People's Republic of China over the issue of Tibet. I quote:

"[Hu and Sarko] finally agreed to meet at Sarkozy's hotel, the Mandarin, a helpfully named venue. But the Chinese refused to turn up until the Elysée issued a joint diplomatic communique in which France moderated its position on Tibet. The meeting finally went ahead just after 10.30pm. The air cleared - the two men discussed whether Macau should be blacklisted or given more time. But it took an intervention from Barack Obama to help seal the deal on tax havens as the French and the Chinese haggled until the last five minutes of the summit. "Let's get this all in some kind of perspective guys," Obama said at one point."

So the deal on Macau was done in the last five minutes of the conference. But was the OECD in the loop for that last five minutes? From the five hours it took to publish the so called black, white and grey list of tax havens, I am guessing not.

Only at 2120 did it release to the fate of Macau:

"China is on a third "white list" of jurisdictions that have substantially implemented the internationally agreed tax standards. But the OECD said China's two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao had so far only "committed to implement" the internationally agreed tax standard."

Now take a in this PDF. Can you find the word "Macau"? You can not. What you will see is that China is given the same gold plated reference as the UK, but then there is footnote number two.

Footnote number two simply states: "Excluding the Special Administrative Regions, which have committed to implement the internationally agreed tax standard."

Now even would not have needed long to provide a comprehensive deconstruction of this particular text.

Hong Kong and Macau function as major financial centres for the PRC economy as a whole, and for the South East Asian region generally. If you add, as Reuters did, the word "so far only" committed to going legit then surely Macau and Hong Kong should appear somewhere on the grey list (the black list is for reprobates who will not even commit to the international standard: Costa Rica, Phillippines, etc)

How does Austria get named and shamed, while Macau does not even get named? Ask the Dalai Lama.

And what say did the OECD - supposedly an independent arbiter of who's straight and who's crooked - actually have?

Since the "era of banking secrecy is over" I expect we will be soon told.

***

[UPDATE: I missed this, from the FT, which sheds further light on the last minute deal.

"According to the account, which has since been confirmed by non-US officials, Mr Obama got the two leaders to agree that the G20 would "take note" of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development list of rogue offshore tax havens rather than "endorse" that list. This allowed the Chinese to save face, since they do not belong to the 30-member Paris-based OECD. And it allowed Mr Sarkozy to be able to claim back home that he had chalked up a blow against old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon capitalism."

Taking note of the list rather than endorsing it allowed the Chinese to save face. But thinks this will allow the G20 to alter the list in future.]

Here's where I think it's going. There's going to be a big number announced that is an add-up of extra money for the IMF, extra Trade Finance via the World, Regional Development Banks and bilateral deals, plus Special Drawing Rights from the IMF.

I understand the IMF part of the deal could be in the region of an extra $500bn as I indicated earlier; the extra trade finance piece will be around $100bn; so to get it anywhere near a politically significant $1trillion, a hefty chunk has to come from expanding the IMF's SDR programme. Currently $20bn it will likely be hiked significantly.

What this does is allow the governments to put a big figure on their already-agreed fiscal stimuli (a recent private estimate was 2.7 trillion over 2 years). Then put another big figure on what you might call international-institution liquidity plus loans.

This is what they are agreeing to do in lieu of a fiscal stimulus. Expect Gordon Brown to come out and say we've injected an extra trillion dollars into the economy.

OK, so what's the price they pay for this. To get China to stump up to the IMF they may have to agree to keep Hong Kong and Macau off a blacklist of tax havens. The furia franchese is now, I understand, being directed no longer against the US/UK but against various emerging market countries that often figure in James Bond movies when the scriptwriters want to indicate sleaze. And I mean countries that are actually seated at the table, not tiny "offshore" tax havens.

So what's left is the shape of the commitment on global regulation. Here the language is important: the French/Germans want a principled commitment - every nation, every player, every financial instrument comes effectively "onshore" and "on balance sheet". This is what they're working on now.

What can we tell in advance about the G20 communique?
1. Any figure placed on the fiscal stimulus will refer to what's been achieved already: between $2trn and $3trn. Any new commitment will be a surprise.
2. Expect $500bn extra for the IMF and $100bn specifically to free up trade finance.
3. Lots of fine words about the poor countries and probably some money.

What are the variables?
I would scrutinise the wording in two areas: monetary policy and regulation. We will see today whether the ECB moves further towards zero interest rates and whether it signals what it will do when conventional monetary policy runs out. If quantitative easing gets enshrined as an offically recommended tool by the G20 it will have gone from outlaw/pariah status to the ruling centre of power in less than 90 days.

On regulation, there is still the potential for this to cause a bust up. I would caution against the idea that it is done and dusted. The British media did not fully translate the Merkel-Sarkozy press conference yesterday. I was there and I read it as a very detailed list of red lines on hedge funds, bonuses, tax havens and securitised finance.

I think it will be very hard for the Franco-German bloc to achieve what they want on securitisation: they want effectively to abolish off-balance sheet finance in principle - with all instruments traceable back to a regulated onshore bank.

However, in return for a climbdown on this I think we'll get stronger language on hedge funds and tax havens than the Anglo-Saxons want. In particular with tax havens Sarkozy made clear he is not fetishising issuing the blacklist now, but when it is issued, he wants decisive action to close them down - not only as tax boltholes but as screens for off-balance sheet finance.

If the final shape of the communique is what I think it's going to be, then it's Obama who has to go home and explain to Wall Street how he's going to implement it. They will not be happy.

Finally I think, despite all the cynicism, we have to give plaudits where they are due: if the G20 manages to go from insignificant to a body where the big economies can horse trade effectively and then implement the results, that's an achievement. The summit too could be seen as an achievement. Certainly, compared to the charade of Washington G20, where people simply read out statements and left, it seems to be a working body.

Will it be enough to head off a slump? If you buy the slump scenario, no. The fiscal stimulus lacking co-ordination and inadequate (compared to the 3% of GDP asked for by for example Paul Krugman) will not stave off the collapse. The re-regulation could accelerate the retreat to national pools of capital. And trade finance does not reignite the multi-step production process: that's an issue of credit, not trade finance.

The IMF money will probably be enough to stop collapse in East Europe. But then the stricken countries simply settled down into snowy stasis. And, since aid to the poorest countries has not exactly ignited an industrial revolution there, more aid will do what it always does.

That's my prediction: scrappy, inadequate, half-successful but not a disaster, indeed a personal success for Gordon Brown. Let's see...

I arrived at the "rendezvous" - a derelict car park - at 5am. I was security checked at 0504. I got on the coach at 0505. The coach was turned away from the Summit the first time at around 0520, again at 0525 and then got pre-turned away a third time at 0600. Then we went back to the rendezvous to find that ALL coaches containing accredited journalists had been turned away from the summit.

Grimness turned to humour but not for long. Our convoy attempted a second time to gain entry to the offsite place where we are allowed to get our security passes. But no, yet again the same policeman - and seemingly no communication. By this time various journalists were earbashing FCO and Downing Street press officers who thought they would be getting calls about a fiscal stimulus.

I am pleased to say that Newsnight, Sky and ITN all played a heroic role in the, shall we call it kerfuffle, that led to journalists leaving their buses and marching into the facility.

This three hour wait of course, and this level of hassle, rudeness and incomprehension by those in authority, is exactly what the poorest of the world have to put up with just to get into work, or get to a water source, every single day.

I am in the Excel centre now (arrival time 0800 - it is about half a mile from where I was at 0500), and I think they've probably managed to avoid a Dome style scenario, but the sight of journalists from countries we would call third world shaking their heads in disbelief makes this more than just a quirky twist to the start of the day.

The hierarchy here is: (i) police, (ii) civilians in bibs who work for various security firms, and then (iii) politicians, journalists and lastly (iv) the public. It is of course that middle layer of people suddenly empowered by hi-vis bib to obstruct those lower than themselves, but with no power to communicate or break through obstacles higher than themselves, that oversee chaotic events like this.

Suddenly I can understand very clearly why the British state does not want to run a major financial institution. I think the Germans could probably run a nationalised company decently, but we, the Brits, have this way of turning everything into a chaotic soul-less mess.

Sky News is calling it the Great British Cock-up. Jon Snow of Channel Four is voxing the foreign journalists on their views about the mess. At times like this I always think of Orwell: the genius of Nineteen Eighty Four is that it imagined what Britain would look like if it became a bureacratic collectivist dictatorship. I think I have just had a glimpse of it.

I am waiting for the Sarkozy-Merkel press conference. Here is my impression of the day and the summit so far.

First, if you needed any reminding of the severity of the problems we are dealing with, the lightning provides it. The company was put into administration yesterday: immediate pay cuts for the workforce, plus the loss of their pension rights is what made them take action unprecedented in the manufacturing sector for a decade.

Visteon was spun off from Ford a couple of years ago and now it is bust: that is how close to bust some of our major companies are. I just spoke to the strikers at Enfield over the phone and they are all too well aware of the link between their story and the one I am trying to report today.

The good news is, so are the politicians. I can think of no ruling politician who is prepared to say "let the crisis rip", as Hoover did in the early 1930s, and as happened under the Conservatives in the early 1980s.

This is not to do with party politics; there is a centre-left, centre-right consensus on display here that the poor, the powerless and the ordinary Joe has to be protected from the heavy impact of stagnation.

In that sense Obama-Brown felt historic; the President may be on the way up, the PM probably on the way out, but it was a moment when the UK and US stood together and explicitly espoused what you might call a social justice agenda. And it looks like that new, shared agenda will survive any change of government here.

What clearly threw Obama was the question from the Â鶹ԼÅÄ's Political Editor Nick Robinson: people are blaming America, who do you blame? Also, the suggestion that American power is waning, he did not like the question and swerved it with a soundbite.

The fact is the rest of the world thinks the Anglo Saxon model caused this crisis and they see American power as diminished. Whatever public denial, the success of the G20 process depends on the US elite understanding the new reality. Obama, as a former student of "power analysis" gets it, but the US elite as a whole (and electorate) probably not.

Behind the rhetoric, what Merkel-Sarko are about to do is issue a notice that the EU giants will have universal regulation as one of the goals of tomorrow; even though the rest of the G20 lined up pro fiscal stimulus with Obama, do not think they are any softer on the Anglo Saxon model.

Above all, the quiet signals are: the emerging world will not see the cost of recovery dumped onto them via a dollar devaluation. China is elbowing its way to leadership of the "non-blue-eyed" capitalists. Its proposal for a new global reserve currency will not get into the communiqué, but the Chinese have risked a lot of face on this. They will push the idea hard in the back channels.

What we are about to see (tune into to see the back of my head) is the Franco-German powerhouse of Europe lay down its red lines on regulation. It is a moment with resonance way beyond economics.

Europe will have its equal voice; forget the Sarko walkout: if they do not get global regulation they will shut US finance as we know it out of Europe using single EU regulation. Cynics who think the UK will hegemonise any EU regulator are probably going to be disabused.

As I write the hacks around me are getting excited about the . But a much bigger act of force is happening, albeit served by genteel surroundings and instant translation; the re-arrangement of global power.

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