G-20

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include anti-poverty initiatives, access to financial services, and inequality.

On June 17^th, 2012 Ashoka Changemakers in partnership with the G2012 Mexico Leaders’ Summit announced the creation of a new financial inclusion competition. The G2012 Mexico Financial Inclusion: Innovative Solutions for Unlocking Access competition seeks to highlight the lack of financial services geared towards the poor and encourage the development and growth of financial products focused on underserved and unbanked communities.

When Mexico assumed the role of the G20 Presidency, President Calderon with the support of G20 member countries, broadened the group’s financial and economic focus by asserting, “Under the Mexican G20 Presidency actions to foster financial inclusion, including financial education and consumer protection have become a priority of the finance track agenda.”  With financial inclusion a key agenda item, the group has reached across sectors to learn from and collaborate with key stakeholders in the space, including the private sector, civil society and non-G20 member states.

Europe's fiscal future is looking bleaker by the day. This weekend, the G-20 will convene in Mexico to determine how to avoid a possible global market meltdown spurred by European bank debt and default. In this podcast, two members of New America's World Economic Roundtable --Jonathan Carmel, the portfolio manager at Carmel Asset Management, and Peter Tchir, the founder of T. F. Market Advisers -- talk about the implications of the impending Spanish bank bailout, the possible consequences of this weekend's Greek election, and how the U.S.

As the Great Recession rumbles on, hitting the old, very rich countries of Europe and North America far harder than the new, somewhat rich economies of Asia and Latin America, the traditional order of global financial governance is looking increasingly frayed. At the Group of 20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, on June 18-19, world leaders are expected to issue bold statements about their commitment to reshaping institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to reflect shifts in the economic balance of power.

The eurozone crisis has re-emerged with rising borrowing costs in Italy and Spain and increasing concerns about the prospects for growth.

-- This is a guest post by Jay Pelosky, Principal, J2Z Advisory, LLC.  It was originally posted on the Huffington Post. --

China’s surplus fell from 10.1% of GDP in 2007 to 5.2% in 2010.  Whether its current account will continue to decline or will return to higher levels seen in the mid-2000s is a subject of considerable disagreement.

In today's Huffington Post, Bruce Jentleson, a policy wonk, and Jay Pelosky, a seasoned global investor, argue that the public and private sectors in the United States must cooperate if the country is to "revitalize domestically and compete globally."

Lincoln Ellis, Managing Director of the Strategic Financial Group and Chief Investment Officer of the Linn Group, spoke with Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Carol Massar yesterday about the World Economic Roundtable.

-- This is a guest post by Jay Pelosky, Principal, J2Z Advisory, LLC --  Japan’s massive earthquake, follow on tsunami and subsequent nuclear power plant upheaval have reinforced uncertainty regarding the strength of global economic activity and the appropriate financial assets prices to reflect that activity. The Arab Spring and EU debt crisis meant such uncertainty was already in the air in the weeks preceding the March 11^th earthquake.