Bono, Larry Summers pen op-ed setting goals for G20 summit

An unlikely duo — Bono and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers — are joining forces once again ahead of the Group of 20 (G20) summit, saying in a new op-ed that “the need is even greater for decisive financial action on behalf of the world’s poorest people.”

The pair co-bylined a Washington Post opinion piece published Thursday, called “A world on fire: How the G-20 can douse the flames.”

“This is a time to plan, not panic. To organize, not agonize. There are strategies we can adopt before the next time we hear someone shout ‘Fire!,’ and we realize it’s the global economy itself that has gone up in flames,” the U2 frontman and the economist wrote ahead of this week’s G20 summit in India, which President Biden is set to attend.

“It’s hardly surprising that more countries across the Global South are losing patience with our model of rules-based freedom and democracy. Long lectures from richer to poorer countries followed by little investment just isn’t working as a formula for winning the benefit of the doubt for the idea of liberal democracy,” the two said.

While during Greece’s 2010 debt crisis, “the International Monetary Fund and European Union committed more than 100 billion euros to the rescue and to prevent financial contagion in Europe,” Bono and Summers said, today, “as the planet burns, as a generation’s progress against poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries erodes, and as thousands if not millions of lives are lost, no remotely comparable effort has been mounted.”

It’s not the first time that the 63-year-old Grammy Award winner — who was a guest at Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this year and has become a frequent presence on Capitol Hill — and the former Harvard University president have teamed up. In 2000, Bono tapped Summers for his debt relief campaign.

Summers, 68, has called Bono an “unlikely but very close friend.”

“I will confess it, I had never heard of him before we had our meeting and Sheryl Sandberg had to force me to take the meeting because I thought that secretaries of the Treasury should only meet with people who had a first name and a last name,” Summers quipped in a 2022 interview of Bono, who was born Paul Hewson.

“He is mesmerizing, both in his charisma and his knowledge. He drove the African debt relief program forward. We had an unlikely coalition and were able to do something important for the continent.”

In their plea ahead of the G20, the two wrote that the summit “offers a chance for us to connect the dots between the climate crisis, growth and development, and the role they play in geopolitical tensions.”

“The African Union must have a permanent seat on the G-20,” they said.

Summers and Bono offered “three big ideas” for leaders gathering at the G20, including to “ramp up all the multilateral development banks,” to “demand that the IMF move deeper on debt and further on flexibility,” and use Russia’s immobilized assets to “rebuild Ukraine and repair the damage caused by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s invasion” which has “devastated Ukraine’s critical supply chain to the developing world.”

“In New Delhi, where we hope the G-20 will become the G-21, some will simply admire the same problems that others are straining to solve. Some will bring sparks. Some might even fan the flames,” Summers and Bono wrote.

“But the world doesn’t need any more arsonists. The world needs its firefighters at last to leave the station, which means leadership that recognizes the danger we’re all facing.”