HANDSHAKE BROKERED BY OBAMA SAVES DAY

Ultimately it boiled down to an Obama-brokered handshake between Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy, according to US officials. The reality may be more prosaic, and the agreement of a final summit text on Thursday was the culmination of weeks of work by officials from 20 countries. But Barack Obama's self-effacing approach to summitry – one that was on Thursday remarked upon by several non-US officials – certainly did no harm.

According to senior US officials, towards the end of the summit Mr Obama pulled Mr Sarkozy and Mr Hu aside in full view of the plenary session with several officials and translators in tow.

The US president then brokered a compromise between his Chinese and French counterparts on an issue so arcane and inconsequential that it is hard to believe failure to have done so would have led to a collapse of the summit.

According to the account, confirmed by non-US officials, Mr Obama got the two leaders to agree that the G20 would “take note” of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development list of rogue offshore tax havens rather than “endorse” that list.

This allowed the Chinese to save face, since they do not belong to the 30-member Paris-based OECD. And it allowed Mr Sarkozy to claim back home that he had chalked up a blow against Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

In fact everybody, including Mr Obama and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, who on Thursday declared an end to the “Washington consensus”, has been reading the funeral rites of old-style unregulated financial markets and Thursday's nine-page communiqué spelt out some of the detail. More importantly for Mr Obama, he can now claim back home that he has led the global effort to tackle the global recession while staving off any attempt to pin the blame on the US.