But after the fanfares, the press analysis and the TV specials, does this big-name gathering have any point? What can it do? What might it decide? Is there anyway, a one-size-fits-all conclusion, at which the most sensible and workmanlike of conferences might arrive?

Or is this just grandstanding for the sake of political grandstanding?

Well for a start, everyone is not going to be there. Like a sensible man, Senator Barack Obama – the President-elect of the United States – has politely stepped back, and one sees why.

All the horrors of recession will be his from January 20 of next year. As he pointed out a week ago at his Press conference setting out the objectives of the transition period, there can be only one President.

Today, he would have been an observer, a terribly important observer, but outside the loop of firm policy and decision-making.

His suggestions would be listened to gravely, and might be followed in some measure. A contrite George W Bush would try to help. But Barack Obama would not be speaking with the clunking authority of the President of the United States.

Without the next President, anything the conference might decide will be advisory, inconclusive and tentative. As the lawyers like to say, it will be persuasive but have no binding authority.

People of a disobliging sort will see this high occasion as another of those personality outings and public relations festivals which begin with a fanfare and end with a raspberry.

Grand conferences took place towards the end of the war. Potsdam looked at the future of Europe. Yet the actual future was determined by where Russian soldiers had last put their boots.

On the economic front, the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 – which this weekend's gathering seeks to emulate – put in place a new financial order which came into being after the Second World War ended.

I can't see this latest conference, however, dispersing without the words "anti-climax", "vanity" and "typical politicians" following it.

It is a weakness endemic in the trade. Politicians love to be seen
doing something. They are photographed getting off an aeroplane at some famous city. They are photographed getting back onto the plane and they issue communiqués about a full and frank exchange of views. "Nada," as they say in Spain. Nothing.

The exchanges of view which matter are quiet: corridor work, little huddles, and, in the technology age, intense video-conferencing one-to-one, then extended to other parties if an idea seems to have legs.

After real exchanges, fruitful ones, the media will be told later. Frankly the trouble we are in is too bad and too deep for the show business that we will see this weekend.

Even a sober and careful conference starts on the dubious premise that a global crisis needs a single global solution. Britain is reasonably enough nationalising banks and planning to borrow very heavily. This will mean higher taxes in the future.

Germany, also in recession, is still the champion exporter with an economy which makes things
and sells them. France has been hit, but French banks are models of sense; three quarters of their business is high-street retail.

The United States has been a leader in the banking folly and in pursuit of consumption beyond prudence or reason.

But the US, being physically so big, has the material means under a sensible leader to come out of recession. Though even here, US economists now see travails in the real economy never expected when only the banks were falling.

Perhaps British Ministers should concentrate on Britain's griefs. For we are in a dark wood and must struggle to come out of it.

The British experience of a decade and more is one of folly worked
up to calamity. And what a calamity: the implosion of princely finance houses, negative inflation in prospect and banks refusing to lend to anybody, especially other banks.

British interest rates are responsibly forecast at zero. Imprudent borrowers for houses, who have purchased from yet more imprudent lenders, have been weeping in the streets.

A proper response to that catalogue may be the proposal of economics expert Paul Mason, the clever, sinister economics editor on Newsnight. Capitalism, he says in the current New Statesman, hasn't failed. The banks have failed capitalism and failed us all.

So let us have state banks which will never touch a derivative, which listen to their economists, and which concentrate on financing steady orthodox business – sane capitalism.

The second target should be debt. It has become the universal commodity. Mr Brown plans, probably rightly, to spend money to turn wheels, to pay wages to circulate and start things up again. But for this he will be borrowing from the future. More useful than any conference would be to find the economies in Britain which might mitigate that new debt.

We take wars and their rolling billions of costs for granted. Put
aside arguments about morality. Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan would diminish that debt. So would terminating the grievous financial burden of Trident, the new fleet of nuclear submarines.

That too was vanity, Tony Blair cutting a figure. It could cost up
to £70bn long-term. Agree or disagree, such options apply here
in Britain.

This is the task for Ministers, one to seriously change the economic landscape. This, and not high-flown conferencing, is the serious business of the times.