“This generation,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said of his contemporaries, “has a rendezvous with destiny.” Our generation — at least, its leaders, judging by the likely results of this week’s Group of 20 meeting in London — is doing its damnedest to duck anything so momentous.

The G-20 leaders haven’t failed for lack of ideas. The Obama administration has made a compelling case that nothing short of a coordinated global stimulus can fix a global recession. The leaders of continental Europe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in particular, have argued persuasively that the excesses of global finance require global regulations administered by global agencies. In the end, having duly considered each other’s proposals for global stimulus and global regulation, the two sides reached a compromise. They would do neither.

Of all the G-20 summiteers, only the United States and China have committed themselves to spending programs big enough to put a dent in our proto-depression. Germany, the world’s largest exporter and biggest proponent of fiscal discipline, remains adamantly opposed to countercyclical spending. If this were a normal recession, its opposition to deficit spending might make some sense. The Germans argue that their more social form of capitalism already mitigates much of the economic distress that we Americans experience when our economy goes south. In good times, the German government puts revenue from payroll taxes and employers into a special fund that it deploys in hard times to boost the incomes of workers whose hours have been cut back. Depending on how you look at it, this is socialist flummery or an application of Joseph’s advice to Pharaoh to set aside resources in the seven fat years to get Egypt through the seven lean ones. Either way, it’s an effective countercyclical program. So if Germany is providing us models for countercyclical spending, isn’t it doing enough? Not if a projection by Commerzbank — that Germany’s economy will decline by a stunning 6 to 7 per cent this year — comes to pass. As the world’s largest exporter, the Germans are excruciatingly vulnerable when other nations can no longer afford to buy their goods. They need to boost their economy so they can buy more of their own.

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