Italy hopes tighter financial rules agreed at G20 summit

The upcoming Group of Twenty (G20) summit must focus on reaching a global agreement aimed at tightening financial rules and boosting actions to support sustainable development, sources from Italian government told Xinhua on Tuesday. Italy hopes the G20 summit would reach two main objectives: the adoption of new financial rules to increase global markets' stability, transparency and information, and the fight against speculation over raw materials-- primarily food and energy, said the sources. "It is necessary that world leaders adopt at the meeting a new set of tighter and more transparent global financial rules in order to stabilize the economic system and further boost sustainable development," they said. According to Italy's government, it was essential to curb financial speculation over raw materials and food products for two reasons: on one hand to reduce the Western countries' dependency on oil and gas as their primary energetic sources, while on the other to tackle the rising poverty and hunger in poor developing countries such as those in Africa. Talking about the ongoing financial turmoil, they stressed that it was at a global level and therefore needed a global approach as it was not exclusively a European Union (EU) problem linked to the fragile budgets of its member states. "The European Council meeting last week identified a series of solutions to boost budgetary stability, cut down on sovereign debt levels and stimulate economic growth and this is the path along which Italy is moving," explained the sources. However, they said "a country's sustainability cannot depend exclusively upon the binding EU's Maastricht Treaty rules but must instead also take into account the aggregate debt, which is composed of both public and private debt". The sixth G20 summit is scheduled to be held in the southern French city of Cannes on Nov. 3-4. The eurozone debt crisis is expected to dominate the meeting's agenda, together with issues of addressing global imbalance, financial systems' reform, price control mechanisms and development.