19 July 2013

G20 emphasises growth ahead of austerity

"Strengthening the existing practices of public debt management is an important means of  achieving more resilient public finances. We welcome the intention of the IMF and the  World Bank to review and update the “Guidelines for Public Debt Management” in light of the experience to date. We look forward to a progress report to the Leaders’ Summit in September and initial suggestions for updating the Guidelines by our October meeting. We also call on the OECD for an interim report on its update of OECD leading practices for  raising, managing, and retiring public debt, including on state guarantees, by our next  meeting.

"We commend the progress recently achieved in the area of tax transparency and we  fully endorse the OECD proposal for a truly global model for multilateral and bilateral automatic exchange of information. We are committed to automatic exchange of information as the new, global standard and we fully support the OECD work with G20 countries aimed at setting such a new single global standard for automatic exchange of information. We ask the OECD to prepare a progress report by our next meeting, including a timeline for completing this work in 2014. We call on all jurisdictions to commit to implement this standard. We are committed to making automatic exchange of information attainable by all countries, including low-income countries, and will seek to provide capacity building support for them. We call on all countries to join the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters without further delay. We look forward to the practical and full implementation of the new standard on a global scale. All countries must benefit from the new transparent environment and we call on the Global Forum on Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes to work with the OECD task force on tax and development, the World Bank Group and others to help developing countries identify their need for technical assistance and capacity building. We are looking forward to the Global Forum establishing a mechanism to monitor and review the implementation of the global standard on automatic exchange of information. We urge all jurisdictions to address the Global Forum’s recommendations and especially the fourteen where the legal framework fails to comply with the standard without further delay. We ask the Global Forum to draw on the work of the FATF in connection with beneficial ownership, and also ask the Global Forum to achieve the allocation of overall ratings regarding the effective implementation of information exchange upon request at its November meeting and report to us at our first meeting in 2014.

The FSB will report to the St Petersburg Summit on the progress made and next steps towards addressing the “too big to fail” issue. We strongly support the work to establish robust resolution regimes and resolution plans consistent with the scope and substance of the FSB’s Key Attributes of Effective Resolution for any financial institution that could be systemically important beyond the banking sector, and look forward to pilot assessments by the FSB, IMF and World Bank using the Key Attributes’ assessment methodology. We will undertake any legislative and other steps needed to enable authorities to resolve financial institutions in an effective manner, including in a cross-border context. We further encourage the FSB and IMF to continue work to address cross-border resolution issues. We recognise that structural banking reforms can facilitate resolvability and call on the FSB, in collaboration with the IMF and the OECD, to assess cross-border consistencies and global financial stability implications taking into account country-specific circumstances.

We note the continued progress in implementing OTC derivatives reforms, and that  further work remains to ensure greater consistency in regulatory standards. We are committed to rapidly complete the remaining legislative frameworks and regulations for these reforms. In particular, the recent EU-US announcement on cross-border issues related to OTC derivatives reforms is a major constructive step forward, which paves the way for resolving remaining conflicts, inconsistencies, gaps and duplicative requirements globally. Further steps remain needed, and we have asked key regulators to report by the September Summit on how they have resolved these cross-border issues. In this context, we agree that jurisdictions and regulators should be able to defer to each other when it is justified by the quality of their respective regulations and enforcement regimes, based on essentially identically outcomes, in a non-discriminatory way, paying due respect to home  country regulation regimes.

We note the outcomes of the G20 high-level seminar on benchmarks and credit rating agencies (CRAs). We look forward to the FSB progress report on both national authorities’ and standard setting bodies’ steps to reduce reliance on CRA ratings for the St Petersburg Summit. We welcome the completion of IOSCO’s Principles for Financial Benchmarks and the establishment of the FSB’s Official Sector Steering Group to coordinate work on the necessary reforms of interest rate benchmarks and guide the work of a Market Participants Group.

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