It might be a little churlish to ask what was the point of the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Dubai, which finished yesterday. Perhaps much good work was done behind the scenes, the fruits of which will be evident in the months ahead.
But the public pronouncements from the meeting suggest that little was achieved.
In the area of exchange rates the meeting only succeeded in sowing confusion. This week's gathering is likely to be remembered for one thing - the comments by the finance ministers of the so-called Group of Seven industrialised countries, calling for "flexibility" on exchange rates. Rightly or wrongly the markets took this as a signal that the US had got its way in putting pressure on Japan to limit its interventions in the foreign exchange markets to hold down the value of the yen. The US would also like to see a revaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, which it believes is being kept too low.
The dollar has weakened over the past year, a natural enough reaction to the size of the US current account balance of payments deficit. However there are dangers in the Bush administration trying to talk down the currency, particularly if this is seen as an attempt to buoy the US economy ahead of the 2004 presidential election. Too sharp a dollar fall would cause instability in financial markets and would hit EU growth prospects hard.
A dollar slump could also rebound on the US, if it made it more difficult to attract the huge capital investment required in US financial assets to offset the current account deficit. If US interest rates have to rise to attract this capital, then this could seriously damage growth prospects, more than offsetting any short-term boost to US exporters from a devaluing currency.
Worryingly, the G7 statement and the briefings which followed have left the impression that international governments are not at one on this issue. Nor has the meeting managed to make much progress on issues such as debt relief and the management of the international financial institutions. And all this follows the recent fiasco of Cancun, when the world trade talks collapsed.
There is a dangerous thread here of a lack of international co-operation in economic matters, reflecting to some extent what is happening in the political arena. The currency markets may stabilise. The world trade talks may get back on track. But the longer international economic policy-makers send out divergent signals on key policy areas, the greater the danger to the international economic outlook, which is already subject to more than enough uncertainty.