The leaders plan to meet on April 30, 2009 - 101 days after the new Administration commences - - and at Saturday's meeting, President-elect Obama had sent two advisers - - former Secretary of State  Madeleine Albright and former Republican Congressman Jim Leach. The President-elect on his first radio address as president-elect, thanked President Bush, who “has initiated this process, because our global economic crisis requires a coordinated global response.”

The G-20 represents 85% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) and comprises the seven major industrialized nations—Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and the United States—plus Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey. It also includes the 27-nation European Union, represented by France, which holds the rotating EU presidency. Both the IMF and World Bank participate.

 The leaders vowed to use “fiscal measures” and monetary policy to shore up the world economy but they did not announce a coordinated stimulus programme.

 The communiqué blamed the crisis on, ”weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices, increasingly complex and opaque financial products and consequent excessive leverage.”

Without naming the US, the leaders said that ”policymakers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in the financial markets”.

The agreement is seen as a partial victory for European leaders who have proposed new market regulations to address the serious crisis.

“I am a friend of the United States of America, but if you ask, was it easy? No, it wasn’t easy,”French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, adding that he did not fly to Washington “simply for the pleasure of traveling.”

He said the Americans had made concessions even by agreeing to discuss issues like regulatory coordination and executive pay. The communiqué, however, indicated that there were concessions on both sides.

President George W. Bush welcomes the People's Republic of China President Hu Jintao to the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008, at the National Museum Building in Washington, DC.

On Thursday, President Bush had  warned in a speech on Wall Street of the threat to free markets from over-regulation.

The statement did not refer to hedge funds as needing regulation, which Germany has long proposed.

Germany indicated that the issue will be addressed later. “There shall be no blind spots,” said theGerman chancellor Angela Merkel.

The leaders also did not address the issue of role of the International Monetary Fund and its need for additional funding.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has in recent weeks been urging China and Gulf oil producers to use some of their reserves to bolster their contributions to the IMF.

At the next meeting, which Sarkozy proposed to hold in London, the leaders will debate specific proposals developed by those groups.

A European proposal for example, provides for so-called colleges of supervisors, which would meet regularly to share information about global banks with operations in many countries.

Another idea is to expand the membership of the Financial Stability Forum, a  group of finance ministers and central bankers from industrialised countries, to include emerging markets like Brazil, India and China.

President Bush said:“Whatever reforms are recommended, we need to be guided by this simple fact: that the best way to solve our problems and solve the people’s problems is for there to be economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free market capitalism.”

The G-20 leaders pledged to complete the Doha round of global trade talks and they warned against a return to protectionism.

Sarkozy and Brown had promoted the meeting as a start to a "Bretton Woods II" project  - - a reference to the 1944 summit in Breton Woods, New Hampshire, where a global financial framework was agreed, including the estblishment of the IMF and World Bank.

On Saturday, Bush said several more meetings would be needed before comparable reforms could be put in place.

“A meeting is not going to solve the world’s problems,”he cautioned, but added: “I will tell you: I thought this was a very successful meeting.”