Representatives of the world’s poorest countries joined other U.N. member states in New York this week at a three-day meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on the global financial crisis and its impact on the developing world.

Many delegates from “the South” blasted capitalism and the wealthy Western powers for the crisis. For once they could say they did not cause it though they are the biggest victims. Cuban Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz told the delegations — roughly three quarters of the General Assembly’s 192 member states are participating — that retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro had foreseen the current crisis nearly three decades go.

During a conference of nonaligned countries in 1983, Castro said in a speech that “declining foreign trade, hunger and unemployment” would eventually take their toll on the global economy,” Malmierca Diaz said.

“The current state of the world economy and its gloomy outlook should lead to a profound reflection in governments and in the most lucid minds of the developed world,” the minister said, adding that Castro’s analysis was “still valid.”

Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister and finance minister of the Caribbean island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, said the world economy is in “the worst crisis of international capitalism since 1929.”

“The chickens have come home to roost as the poor and the working people suffer consequentially,” Gonsalves said.

Ecuador’s fiery leftist President Rafael Correa agreed. He also joined the chorus of voices calling for the abolition of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which Cuba’s Malmierca Diaz said have “impoverished” the developing world.

There were other critical voices. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chided the world’s wealthy nations for reneging on pledges to boost aid to Africa. “Surely if the world can mobilize more than $18 trillion to keep the financial sector afloat, it can find more than $18 billion to keep commitments to Africa,” he said.

Turnout of world leaders has been low. Fewer than a dozen have shown up at what was billed as a summit meeting. Diplomats said that was partly due to the fact that the conference, originally scheduled for June 1-3, was postponed to this week by General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a leftist former foreign minister of Nicaragua, due to the lack of agreement on a set of draft proposals on reforming the global financial system. Presidents Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, leftist firebrands and critics of the United States from Bolivia and Venezuela, were supposed to attend but failed to appear.

The conference is set to adopt its financial reform proposals on Friday. The final draft was watered down from an earlier version prepared by D’Escoto that Western delegations complained was too radical for them. (One sentence in it read: “Mother Earth can live without human beings but we cannot live without Mother Earth.”)

Among the proposals in the final draft document are calls for greater supervision over hedge funds and the use of derivatives, gender and geographic equality at the IMF and World Bank and increased aid and debt relief for developed countries.

Diplomats from developing countries complained that the final draft was disappointing since it was thin on specifics and contained no concrete promises of new aid. Western diplomats said it was imperfect but a vast improvement over D’Escoto’s initial version.

The draft also calls for the United Nations to play a greater role in global financial matters. The poor nations outside the Group of 20 club of big developed and developing nations — India, China and Brazil are members — think that is a good thing. But big developed powers like the United States have traditionally opposed the idea of letting the other 191 U.N. member states tell it what to do with its money. (Diplomats said the United States, European Union and other Western participants would issue statements after the proposals’ adoption distancing themselves from some of language in the final document.)

Rene Grotenhuis, head of the Catholic development aid alliance CIDSE and director of the Dutch organization Cordaid, welcomed the idea of letting the U.N. play a bigger role: “Global economic policy should be like the World Cup, with every nation playing — not a tournament for rich countries and their invited guests.”

What do you think?

It took only a few disarmingly pointed questions from four 7th grade Berlin students to get German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck to loosen up and deviate from the usual stock answers he - and fellow political leaders - serve up.

In perhaps his most candid public comments since taking office three years ago, Steinbrueck admitted long meetings cause his rear end to get sore and also compared deficit-spending just for consumption purposes to spending money on chocolate bars. He also said he doesn’t forget the names of journalists who write nasty comments about him. Here are a few of the more choice morsels from Steinbrueck’s interview in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper published on Sunday:

Question: Do you get tired in your job?
Steinbrueck: Do you mean if I fall asleep at my desk?

Question: No, I mean do you sometimes get sick and tired of your job?
Steinbrueck: That’s a dangerous question because some people might draw the wrong conclusion if I said what really brews inside me. But yes, sometimes I get really shirty. There are some meetings that are so incredibly long that at some point your rear end starts to hurt.

Question: Is that the reason you didn’t go to important meeting of G7 finance ministers in Washington?
Steinbrueck: You mean the trip in 2007? No, the reason for that is my wife had planned a trip to Namibia for the whole family many months before that and paid for it with an inheritance she got from her mother. And then the date for the Washington meeting came up. I had to make a decision: fly to Washington, where I go three or four times a year anyhow, or leave my family in the lurch. It was an easy decision for me. But some journalists then criticised me as ‘Safari Steinbrueck’. I’ll be honest with you guys. I’ve made a note of their names.”

Question: No, we meant the trip this weekend, another one that you cancelled on.
Steinbrueck: Oh that one. That’s because I’m going to an SPD party congress in my state to be nominated for the next parliament. That’s important in a democracy. I wrote a letter to the other finance ministers and they all understood my reasons.

Question: Is it possible that Germany could one day go bankrupt?
Steinbrueck: No, you must have heard about that in a horror film! Germany is one of the strongest countries in the world. We’ll master this crisis.

Question: What will happen if we keep going further into debt?
Steinbrueck: You can take on debt if the money is going to be used for sensible things - when you invest it in people and things that will bring us progress or advantages down the road. If that’s the case, borrowing money is totally sensible. But it’s bad if you borrow money just for spending on consumption, like for example buying chocolate bars.

Neil Dwane, fund firm RCM's chief investment officer in Europe, has an interesting take on the current spat between Germany and the United States over printing money to get out of trouble. You can see Juergen Stark for the latest volley.

Dwane reckons it is all a matter of history. The American psyche, he says, is scarred by the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is up there with the Civil War. Think John Steinbeck or John Boy Walton.

For Germans, however, the 1930s mean something else. It was the era that the Nazis took over, leading to the country's great nightmare. But that, the German psyche has it, was bred in the 1920s when incompetent government led to hyperinflation and worthless money. Think one trillion marks to the dollar. Think wheelbarrows.