Not so impossible. Publicans can exist who will extend a little credit just to keep the customers hooked!
Stiglitz is more than a narcissist playing Jesus Christ in a wicked capitalist world. He represents material forces. Unless the developing world institutions have some veneer of justice to them then they will not be able to promote global coherence in the interests of the capitalists either.
There is increased will in Asia, after the financial crisis of 1997-8, to unite at least against short term financial capitalist flows.
The creation of the Group of 20 is an attempt to get stakeholders defined by population size around the table with stakeholders defined by size of capital.
Bourgeois governments are both instruments for maintaining the domination of one class *and* devices for disguising that domination and reconcile other classes to the justice of it. Without a dialectical theory of the state, it is not possible to see how the skirmishing over global governance is shaping up.
That said, at the moment the sort of remarks coming out of Koch-Weser are very difficult to read, except that he is trying to neutralise US opposition.
Whether in the future as a European he will want to use Asia as a balancing factor against the US remains to be seen, but on the surface he is another model of neo-liberal rectitude with only some hope that he realises this needs to be softened somewhat by recent events and by the Christian Democrat principles that he will know from Germany.
Chris Burford
London