'We want to change the rules of the game in the financial world,' French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed as the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging economies began its two-day summit with dinner at the White House.
'There is a need for urgency,' added British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is calling for a 'college of supervisors' to oversee the world's 30 largest banks.
The summit was optimistically conceived as a latter-day Bretton Woods, the 1944 wartime gathering of dozens of countries that produced much of the architecture of the modern financial system.