G20 pledges make hard work for finance ministers

By Brian Love - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Delivering on G20 leaders' promises of money and more to combat global recession is a hard slog, and this weekend's gatherings of finance ministers in Washington showed just how hard.

One of the clearest illustrations is that IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn admits he is working the telephones hard to secure $500 billion leaders promised the International Monetary Fund with great fanfare at a summit in London three weeks ago.

He is confident the money will come in the end but the count is still $100 billion or more short of the sum that looked like a done deal three weeks earlier at the summit.

Nothing new was agreed in Washington at meetings which began with the G7 club of industrialized economies and widened to the G20 club of industrial and developing economies on Friday, ahead of International Monetary Fund meetings on Saturday and Sunday.

That was no surprise in itself, argued ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, because the major collective decisions on responses to the economic crisis were taken in London on April 2. The job now, he says, is to follow through, which is critical if less glamorous.

Few would disagree.

Marco Annunziata, London-based chief economist at UniCredit bank, nonetheless asks whether the G7 and G20 groups should bother meeting just three weeks after the G20 summit.

"It made obvious that we are still searching for the additional IMF funds and gave us the embarrassing acknowledgement that toxic assets should be a priority, but no hint of a coordinated action on them," he said.