Now the Russian Ambassador to the u. S. Talks about the upcoming g20 summit in st. Petersburg russia. Following his remarks white house advisor for International EconomicsCaroline Atkinson on the summits history and purpose. From the center for strategic and International Studies, this is 45 minutes. Good morning. My name is matthew goodman. I hold the assignment chair at csis and im delighted to welcome you all here. Thank you for peddling here this morning on a soggy friday morning in july. Let me recognize our on line audience in addition to the many people in the room. We have a strong on line audience. You are welcome to follow us on twitter at csis and tweet a way. Please turn off all of your noise makers and other devices so we dont disrupt the speakers. We have started a tradition of doing it sounds like this ahead of these big summits. G20 is the biggest of them all in the area i work on. It will be held labor day just after labor day in st. Petersburg russia and we normally would do this two or three weeks out but because of the Summer Holidays and everything we thought we would get an early start. We are delighted to have a terrific lineup of speakers today which we will get started with and in just one second. We will have after our two keynote speakers the Russian Ambassador and the u. S. Sherpa we will have an expert panel and then a very short break and then we are going to have a senior sherpa perspective on the g20 summit and the agenda they are on. With no further ado let me introduce the president and ceo of csis. Thank you all for coming. I am surprised not to see people dripping. There is a lot of water here these days. There is a very important i look we are going to have this morning and i want to say thanks for all of you for braving it to get here. There forms of internationalism. Structural treatybased internationalism and then consensus internationalism. We all know about structural internationalism places like United Nations and the imf where country spend time developing a Framework Structure and it becomes, its one of the dominant certainly characteristic of internationalism over the last 60 years. The advantage of it of course is that is normative. The next generation knows the things that are important because they have grown up with institutions that these institutions also become brittle over time and they dont work as well over time. So there is a preference often with countries to use consensusbased international, coalitions of the willing, just find people to agree with you and lets go off and do it. The problem is sufficient that its not normative. It doesnt really carry over to the next big problem. This is what the International World community has been wrestling with and in many ways it was the impulse to create the g20. You know the imf and the world bank and the u. N. , we are going to be able to keep up and cope with the crisis as it was unfolding in the Great Recession was starting in 2008 and 2009. Let, you know what were the institutions that were available that were more flexible . The g8 . G8 . Well the g8 is considered to be a bunch of rich white guys. It certainly isnt considered to be representative of the Broad Community but how do you bring a Big Community together . The International Community chose to create something, the g20 and i think it was enormously important in helping at a crucial time to give a sense of direction of a sovereign nation to implement things that there needed to be some form and method to bring it together and get some shared coherence. That is kind of the foundation where we got here but now we asked the question wheres the g20 going . Is it really going to be a normative structural overtime . How does it do that . Its unclear and part of it is the backdrop of what we are going to be dealing with in this conversation. We are going to be thinking together, people that have an interest. How do we find a shared purpose in an International Way on such a complex problem and not fall into the trap of having you know shifting into a structure that becomes brittle over time. Is there legitimacy of this configuration . Certainly is more broadly based than the g8 is but is it, doesnt have the command power . These are the kinds of questions. Now we are lucky one of the most skilled diplomats in the world is with us today, Sergei Kislyak a longstanding friend and we prevailed upon him to come obviously because rush is going to be the host for this g20 summit but also because of his personal talent as a diplomat. He has been in washington during some pretty choppy days. These are not the easiest times to be the Russian Ambassador in washington. But he has handled it with skill and with enormous strategic insight and we are very fortunate that someone like him is here now. This is not the best of days in our relations with each other that its made dramatically better because of his presence and visibility. So with your applause please welcome the honorable Sergei Kislyak. Thank you. [applause] thank you for that presentation but i always feel a little bit oversold and certainly it i was invited to make a welcoming address. Now i am upgraded two keynote speaker and thank you for that. However i was thinking how different my speech would be and whats the difference between welcoming and keynote . In my view both are something that help you to understand what is the russian view in and the organization that we are discussing. Several points. One, this is one of the youngest multilateral mechanisms that is addressing problems that are unifying. And its one of the institutions where russia and the United States however different positions on the issues, Work Together. So being in the same economic crisis, the United States us in the other countries brought us together into a mechanism that may be short of being a director at on normative as a formed mechanism where people can discuss and reconcile National Strategies in the multilateral world very entered to find economies. At the g20 as far as i understand has proved to be rather efficient. Im not suggesting that it was able to resolve all the issues of the crisis but being upgraded in 2008 it did exist prior to death in somewhat more working formats. But in 2008 there was a decision made in order to have it on the level of the leaders and that creates a kind of normative character to the whole kind of consensus that can be achieved with this mechanism. Rush of being a country that 20 or 22 years that we are an integrated part of the world market. That means for us we have highstakes in the vitality and the health of the economic relations in the world. We are adjusted in seeing the International Trade would be favorable for us as well. We certainly also depend on the markets outside russia being an important exporter of things. And for us being in the chair this organization is unique opportunity not only to help together with the others to form a consensus on the Current Issues but also to bea to contribute to the solutions, looking through the optics of our own problems and our own goals. The two main subjects that we have her post for the g20 summit this year are sustained growth and creating jobs. They are not necessarily new to the agenda of the g20, but to focus on these issues is very important because specialists are focusing on how to achieve that kind of strategy. Certainly the National Solutions in the National Strategies will be decided by each and every country but the way to reconcile it has to talk about the issues and i think currently we do not find another that would be as usable for that kind of thing sg 20 taking into account the composition of the countries that are involved. I would also like to say that russia currently enjoys pretty solid Economic Situation in relative terms. With the average growth rate in the world is about 3. 2 and russia is 3. 4. Is it enough for us . Of course not. We want much higher before the crisis and we hope to be able to restore it in the future. But at the same time its still solid and we hope it will be on the increase with in years to come. We also find an increase in our job base. We have an ambitious plan to create additional 25 million jobs. All jobs and creating new. All of this requires a lot of investment so the environment for the investment is also one of our national priorities. Currently the climate according to the National Ratings isnt among the top 20 i would say but i wish we would have a chance to get in the same kind of format in five years. Ill bet we will be in the 20. We are working hard creating conditions for a russia that would be considered by other outside investors as good as the 20 best countries in the world. But even today i think our Investment Climate is very much underrated and we are much better than some at the same time also when it comes to the russian economy, we have enjoyed a pretty stable fiscal environment. We have accumulated significant reserves. We have to fund. One with 84 billion in another reserve fund that is another 80 plus billion dollars. And the National Reserves are 500 plus billion dollars as well. We are almost debtfree country because our external debt is no more than 2. 4 and including internally that is around 10 or 11 . If you compared with the g8 countries with a country that hosts us today i think we are doing in relative terms significantly better. So, for us g20 is a very important mechanism whereby we will try to harmonize national with the others in a way that will be advancing National Goals and also being part of the International Community working on the crisis because we stand to benefit from the Healthy International economic environment as any other g20 country and many others. So the chairmanship of this organization brings a lot of additional work for a russia that we like it because it gives also us an opportunity to invite the best specialists on all the Economic Issues of the current situation, financial, job creation specialist. In a week plus minus we are going to have a unique forum that will bring together ministers of finance and ministers of labor of the g20 that is pretty unique and they understand it will give him a chance to discuss what can be done with the priorities that we have. So, g20 is going to be a significant event in the economic discussions in its own right. It will be an important event for us because of our enrollment and i hope its going to be another confirmation that we all stand to benefit more by working together rather than working against each other. And economics today is one of these areas. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] we will take our seats again. Okay. Welcome back. I hope everyone had a chance to get a cup of coffee. So i am just delighted to introduce the first of two former bosses participating in todays program. Caroline atkinson as the Deputy National security adviser for International Economics at the white house. She is an old colleague and friend of mine and boss, twice and she has actually been at the white house for a couple of years working on a range of International Economic issues, all the important ones including the g20 which she has now inherited as a sherpa for the United States. That is the president s premier advisor on this important summit. She has a very long and distinguished career and International Finance at the bank of england. That is the Washington Post and the times of london and of course the u. S. Treasury department where we Work Together and number of years ago. And importantly her biography says she was born in washington d. C. Like me, that is also true. We have parents of reddish origin but unlike me her parents were wise enough to spend enough time in the u. K. That she picked up that wonderful accent that i unfortunately did not. You will see in the second. With that caroline. Thanks very much matt. It does require a little bit of explanation when i show up as president obamas chauffeur and in fact the g8 David Cameron said i had been wondering whose side you are really on. Anyway its a pleasure to be here this morning and ive want to exclaim to our colleagues that i was just meeting with my russian counterpart so he said that is why she is not here and i said she is why i am late. I think that goes to part of what is so valuable about the g20. I should be clear and interest because when matt and i were working together at the Treasury Department it was the birth of what became the g20. With the asian crisis in the late 90s it was clear that there wasnt really a right grouping of countries to discuss the important issues that crisis revealed and their traditional g7 in those days was too heavily dominated or just consisted of the advanced and big industrialized countries but the crisis is going on in a part of the world that was really underrepresented in those groupings. And i think it was singapore, then singapore leader who suggested to president clinton that there should be some meeting of officials and senior officials and ministers to discuss these important issues in a more global context and president clinton charged bob rubin and Larry Summers who subsequently been charged me with putting together what was then the g20 two. I think the first meeting took place at the Willard Hotel and it was called the willard group. In those days it was extremely difficult to figure out as we were developing which countries whether antony show or russia or brazil, turkey. We didnt have counterparts that we clearly and usually were in contact with in the United States. And so we began to build up this network and of course its subsequently evolved into a quite established process of finance ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting on a regular basis and briefly was the g. 33 and then it was that was the g20. And then that i felt very pleased when the g20 kind of came in to itself, came into its own in 2008 and 2009 with the Global Financial crisis which of course we all thought that was the worst thing that could happen but we discovered that it could be worse with the whole globe starting in the u. S. We realize that the g20 route together the countries that needed to be at the table when you had that Global Economic trouble in that required corporate event coordinated action and meeting at the leaders level really help to promote the breakthroughs in london 2009 that were so important for helping to pull a broken economy back from the brink of the worst recession since the second world war, but it couldve been the worst depression. So that stage i think the g20 kind of proved itself in those early days. It proved itself with the way that you could get leaders focused to drive other economic institutions to take the kind of action that was needed and to understand the spillover from one country to another. Since then of course things have changed a lot and the g20 has a new and not less acute but complex challenge now i think which is how to deal with more chronic issues of the need for coordination. My personal view and the view of my government and my president is that the g20 remains extremely important. It was sort of do the premier Economic Forum after 2008 and 2009 for Global Economic coordination and debate. I think it remains that. The problems that we now face are not the cute ones of the financial crisis. They are more chronic ones of still too slow recovery from the crisis, still too high unemployment in many countries including here and we still face the issues of how we can all Work Together so that our economic policies are supported within the framework of sustained balanced and strong growth in a way that we can understand each other. Now in the past couple of years as many of you will know and matt certainly knows the summits have tended to be a bit dominated by an acute crisis, again not a Global Crisis but a European Crisis and can which was my first g20 summit in this role working for the white house dominated by what was happening with greece and the referendum and so on. In los cabos it was another very interesting moment for the g20 because some of the emerging markets sometimes feel well, we dont get to discuss what the big countries do and we want to have the boys because they affect us. I think that really happened in mexico and if you go back and look at the leaders statement he will see that the europeans who were at that stage in the crosshairs if youd like with the crisis really put on the table some important steps that they plans to take and of course after the June Los Cabos summit there were important steps taken in europe that really lowered the temperature and help to provide financial healing. As we look at the agenda this year and we have the imf