The Group of 20 leading nations comprises the most powerful people on the planet. There is a tremendous competition over which countries should, and should not, be represented. Yet last week’s summit proved almost comically irrelevant to the future of the global economy.

It was a big mistake to try to push Italy into an International Monetary Fund programme without being able to deliver such an outcome. If you really want to force such a momentous decision, the minimum condition is for leaders to say so openly, and for the European Central Bank to announce that it will no longer support the Italian bond market. But they blinked, and let Silvio Berlusconi once again off the hook. The prime minister’s assertion that Italy had no crisis because the restaurants are full is an appropriate reflection of the intellectual depth seen at such gatherings.

I would have preferred the summit to tell the eurozone that it needs to solve the crisis on its own, given that it has the financial capacity to do so. The actual outcome of the summit leaves us in a void, with no crisis resolution strategy in place. In the previous decade, the old Group of Seven failed to prevent various financial crises. This decade, the G20 is failing to solve them.