All the hubbub about the G-20 summit -- the $19.5 million in local spending, the protests, the shuttered Downtown office buildings, and the daydreaming on what Carla Bruni wears to the Warhol -- percolates around the official economic declaration issued at the two-day meeting's end.

Prepare yourself to be mystified or at least underwhelmed.

International negotiating sessions have been going on through the summer to put together a declaration that -- once diplomats, financial gurus and leaders of the world's largest countries are done with it -- will likely be difficult for anyone without a Ph.D. in economics to understand.

Take the following bit from the London summit in April, on financial regulation:

"Key principles underlying this framework include the need to strengthen macro-prudential supervision; for capital requirements to explicitly incorporate counter cyclical elements -- but that in present circumstances it would be inappropriate to raise them until recovery takes hold . . . Leaders also agreed that a central role in coordinating this agenda should be taken by the Financial Stability Forum, now renamed the Financial Stability Board and incorporating all G-20 countries."

And that was from the "explanatory guide" to the London communiqué, issued by the British government.

The actual "Global Plan for Recovery and Reform" issued and agreed to by the G-20 leaders on April 2 is nine pages long and organized around six general pledges. All seem simple enough:

• Restore confidence, growth, and jobs;

• Repair the financial system to restore lending;

• Strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;

• Fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;

• Promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity; and

• Build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery.

The first plank largely revolves around $1.1 trillion the leaders agreed to spend, via the International Monetary Fund, to jump-start the world economy. Speaking of the IMF, the next chunk of the agreement gets into the FSF, FSB, MDB, SDR and other abbreviations that make the reading the communiqué such an eye-closing experience in somnambulation.

It is a truly boring, but important, document. This middle part of the declaration gets to key agreements on the transparency of financial organizations, crackdowns on tax havens and credit rating agencies, and improvements to the ways IMF leaders are chosen.

For poorer countries, the London communique increased development spending by Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), promised more IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) spending to the tune of $250 billion, and got into the "counter-cyclical" elements mentioned above. (The latter meaning: invest more money in developing countries in bad times and -- counter-cyclically -- save more money in good times.)

Back into the alphabet soup for another main promise -- to strengthen the FSB (an advisory body founded a decade ago) so it can identify and stop another global financial meltdown. The board, led by the governor of the bank of Italy and staffed in Basel, Switzerland, will use "EWEs" -- early warning exercises -- to monitor big banking systems and, for the first time, hedge funds, to sniff out problems.

"That's really important, it's quite central," said James Canning, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former researcher for the IMF and the World Bank Group.

"Already changes are being made. One of the financial instruments that got us into trouble were these collateralized debt obligations, CDOs, and things like that -- financial instruments that were not that well understood as it turns out, and which presented a serious systemic risk.

"One thing that tangibly [the London declaration] is going to change is those things now have to be traded through a central clearing house. It used to be that you could do that bank-to-bank and the trouble was nobody exactly knew what was happening. That's how everybody got on the same side of the market and when it collapsed everybody ran for the door at the same time. That wouldn't have happened if you had a central clearing house," he said.

This middle section of the London communiqué also has one of the strongest and most declarative sentences in the whole document, in a section (reportedly demanded by Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany) on cracking down on tax havens and threatening sanctions: "The era of banking secrecy is over."

Despite some victories, differences across banking sectors, boundaries and cultures will make the secrecy boast a challenge.

"Good luck," Dr. Canning said.

The following plank on rejecting protectionism -- which also was pledged at last year's G-20 meeting in Washington -- could elicit similar eye-rolling, as 17 of the member countries have enacted protectionist policies of some kind during the economic crisis. Expect more on these promises and the policing role of the World Trade Organization when the Pittsburgh declaration is released Sept. 25.

Also expect more emphasis at the meeting at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center -- the largest "green" building in the world, after all -- on the eco-friendly promise of the London declaration. Toward the end of the document, it reads:

"We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure."

Carnegie Mellon economics professor Lester B. Lave dismisses that pledge as "largely PR. If it costs jobs or lowered lifestyles to do that, it wouldn't happen."

Dr. Lave, the director of CMU's Green Design Initiative and chair of a National Academy of Sciences panel on energy efficiency, argues it is cheaper for businesses to save energy than to provide it. Going green isn't just good for the environment but for the bottom line of businesses in G-20 countries too.

In other words, Dr. Lave said the green message from the Pittsburgh declaration later this month could be very simple, if writers allowed it to be.

"How can you afford to be a competitive economy if you're not getting energy in the cheapest way you can? The cheapest way is through energy efficiency," he said.

First Published: September 3, 2009, 4:00 a.m.