The first is that it will not be the place to produce even the skeleton of a second Bretton Woods agreement to redesign the world's financial system. Nobody has yet put forward any serious plan for what this might mean, beyond airy statements about the need for multinational rules in a multinational system and the importance of giving emergent economies more say in the way the global economy is run.

The fact is, as we have learned over the past three months, the international economy does not run at all. Or rather, it runs itself until it gets into trouble. At that point, one or more existing institutions step in to sort out the mess. Those institutions include the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the central banks like the Fed and European Central Bank and the Bank of England, the Group of Seven group of finance ministers and the Bank of International Settlements.

This rather ramshackle way of dealing with crisis may not work well in theory, but in practice it seems to have done a reasonable job. There may be a case for bringing more countries into the G7 finance ministers group, like Brazil, China and India.

But that is why the coming event is a G20 summit. Hosted by the United States, it will bring together the G7, the European Union and 12 other major economies: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey. (The French have two seats, as a G7 member and as current holders of the EU chair, so they are giving a spare seat to Spain.)

We shall see how the G20 works out this weekend, and how much time gets wasted by blowhards spouting about the rights of small nations and the unrepresented poor. Such speeches have a point, but not in times of crisis when the world markets are watching closely to see if the world leaders really know what they are doing. We should also bear in mind that cynical old rule that says the effectiveness of a committee is in inverse proportion to the number of its members.

But it is clear that this summit is not going to make any immediate decisions. That is because of the anomalous position of President-elect Obama, who cannot make any commitments until Jan. 20 when he takes office. As a result, expectations of this weekend event are being carefully scaled down by the spin doctors.

The summit will not even reassess the national voting rights and thus the power structure of the IMF, whose boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has made it bluntly clear that after just going through one such bruising process to reallocate voting rights, his organization is in no mood to undergo another.

The summit nonetheless will make some solemn declarations of principle that are going to be important, even if the practical details remain unclear. So it looks almost certain that French President Nicolas Sarkozy will be able to claim something of a triumph, because the grand principle of the plan he laid out before his European Union partners Friday has been broadly accepted.

Simply stated, it says that no market segment, territory and financial institution, including insurance groups and hedge funds, should escape regulation or supervision. From now on, governments and global regulators and international institutions will not simply concern themselves with banks when they talk about the financial sector. The Sarkozy plan also calls for obligatory registration of the rating agencies, and swift moves toward common accounting rules and standards.

Most of this makes sense, and if President George Bush does not see that, his successor certainly will. There will be some argument about that word "territories" in the Sarkozy plan, which would seem to sound a solemn warning for tax havens and centers of banking secrecy. There also may be some argument about "market segment," which could include not just issuers of credit cards (like department stores and gas stations) and car loans, but also private equity groups, sovereign wealth funds and ratings agencies.

Another clear result of the G20 summit will be a much greater role for the IMF. Sarkozy wants to give it "primary responsibility to recommend the necessary measures to restore confidence and stability." Britain's Gordon Brown wants to give the IMF "the necessary funds and the appropriate instruments to support countries in difficulty." Brown has just been in the Middle East, lobbying countries in surplus to fork out new funds for the IMF which has barely $250 billion left in its war chest.

With luck, the G20 also should recognize that their intervention is not always necessary. Sometimes the private sector can fix its own problem. One reason to convene the G20 summit was the sense of real panic early last month when it looked as if the world financial system was going into meltdown. A major cause of that panic was fear that the $60 trillion market in Credit Default Swaps was about to unravel.

These now look much less worrying. Lehman Brothers had some $400 billion in CDS trades out when it went bankrupt in September, and there were very real fears that many of them, as much as 20 percent, could go sour. All Lehman's CDS trades have now been settled at a total cost of $6 billion, and much of this had already been collateralized. This means world finance can breathe a lot easier. The total sum at stake in the CDS market is still over $50 trillion, about the size of global GDP. It now seems, even if the worst happens, that the net cost of resolving these trades will be about 1.5 percent of the total -- less than a trillion dollars.

That's a lot, but it is not fatal. The G20 might want to reconsider grandiose schemes for sweeping new regulations by remembering the way the market solved the Lehman Brothers CDS problem. And then they can start thinking what to do about the looming global recession.

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