Gordon Brown is truly having a rough time. Rebuffed by the United States, International Monetary Fund and others for floating the idea of a tax on financial transactions at this weekend's G20 meeting, he has now got short shrift from the Cayman Islands.

McKeeva Bush, the veteran Caymanian politican who is now premier of the British Overseas Territory, popped in to the Reuters London headquarters for a chat this week. His main concern was to explain plans for making the islands an easier place for financial services personnel to live in. He would like some of those 8,000 hedge nearly 10,000 funds that are registered there to be more than just brass plaques. But, when asked, he also had time to dismiss the idea of a transaction tax out of hand.

"That's an old hat. I have been hearing about it for 25 years. It's just not practicable. It will not work."

And just in case the point was missed:

"We have looked at it and we do not think this is something that would work."

Bush would not be drawn on the idea that a tax on transactions could, metaphorically speaking, sink his Caribbean island homeland under the waves. But Paul Byles, a government financial services consultant who accompanied the premier, did touch on the liquid nature of the issue:

"Tax flows, and they will move somewhere else."

Reuters correspondent Sumeet Desai talks about the G20 draft communique and what it means for rebalancing the world's economy.

The Prime Minister is on the move — and I will be following close behind.

I’m Sumeet Desai, Senior Reuters economics correspondent and over the next couple of weeks I will be with Gordon Brown as he travels to New York to the United Nations general assembly and then on to Pittsburgh for the eagerly anticipated G20 summit.

Then it is back to Britain — we will be at the seaside in Brighton for the Labour Party’s annual conference.

I will be live blogging throughout my journey, sending regular news and thoughts via my Twitter feed, which will appear in the box below, and will also post video updates from my travels with Gordon.

Finance ministers from the G20 are meeting in London on Friday and Saturday to discuss the next steps in battling the world's worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Reuters correspondents from around the world will be at the event, taking you behind the scenes and and providing unprecedented coverage through this live blog.

Here are two word clouds of G20 summit statements - the first is of today's London meeting. The second is from the G20's Washington summit in November 2008. The cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text.

Above: G20 statement after London summit in April 2009

Above: G20 statement after Washington summit in November 2008

(word cloudes are screenshots taken from wordle.net)

Abolish money. Punish the  looters. Eat the bankers.

Ageing 1960s hippies and their youthful anti-globalisation descendants joined in an angry  anti-capitalist protest at the Bank of England on Wednesday, waving placards and shouting slogans reflecting  a common fury at perceived corporate greed.

With worldwide recession destroying jobs by the week, protesters at the G20 protest in the City of London demanded an end to what they see as a global, predatory system that robs the poor to benefit the privileged.

“Welcome to Pig City: One war — class war” was the placard held up by a masked man standing on the doorstep of the central bank.

As hooded protesters scrawled “Peace and Love” on the walls of the Bank, Drogo, an elderly man in flowing multi-coloured robes and carrying an orb on a wooden stick, pointed at staff peering out of the Bank of England’s windows and said:

 ”I am here to tell these fat bankers to get off their arses and save the planet.

“They have to do it because they are still in charge – for now. But of course capitalism has to go down. We have had enough.”

One man strolled along Threadneedle Street dressed as a white-faced corpse in top hat and tails with a placard round his neck that read: “Their greed is killing our planet.”

Some windows were smashed. Protesters hurled paint bombs and empty bottles and occasionally threw punches at police, who responded with baton blows. 

Police said they had deployed one of Britain’s biggest security operations to protect businesses, the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.

But the clashes were almost desultory, if briefly dramatic. There was no general looting.

This was not Seattle, 1999, when demonstrators successfully disrupted a World Trade Organisation meeting, or London’s anti-Iraq war demonstration of 2003, when hundreds of thousands joined together in an impressively unified march for peace.

The G20 meeting was due to take place several miles away in the Docklands area of east London on Thursday.

On Wednesday, there were just 4,000 demonstrators, and the range of causes they espoused was  varied in the extreme, bringing together anti-capitalists, environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and conspiracy theorists of various stripes.

For much of the day the mood was carnival-like. The police managed to seal off the handful of streets around the Bank from the rest of the City, where workers went about their business normally.

A brass band played for several hours. And as the day wore on, protesters peeled away from the knots of angry young men taunting riot police to dance to a mobile disco set up on the steps of the Bank.

Above the disco, someone had fixed a large poster which read: “Hundreds of Architects and Engineers Demand a Real 9/11 Investigation.”

The hard core of violence-prone protesters were a tiny minority. Some masked and hooded young men belied their mysterious appearance by being friendly and talkative.

One, 19-year-old student Francis, explained: “Bankers have made bad gambles and we are all paying for it. They must take responsibility for that.”

There was even a good-natured counter-demonstration by pro-capitalists. One of them, Simon Richards, 50, from Gloucester, western England, said: “We have come to stage a counter-demonstration to show we are not intimidated by the terror tactics of these  protesters.

“We are in favour of free market rather than state control.”

Protester Mia, 21, a student from Denmark, waving an anti-war banner, said the range of causes on offer was a  strength, not a weakness.

She said she wasn’t just angry about international conflict.

“We’re here to protest about all of it. All these crises are linked,” she said.

“The U.S. has to borrow lots of money from China and other places to pay for all these wars, meaning they have less money for housing and other parts of their economy. It’s vital to demonstrate about it, provided it’s peaceful.”

 Here are a selection of placards and graffiti seen at the demonstration.

 ”Capitalism isn’t working”

“Drop books, not bombs”

“Banks are evil”

“People will stop robbing banks when banks stop robbing people”

“Make love, not leverage”

“Resistance is fertile”

“Housing is a right, not a privilege”

“You can rent the house you used to own”

“Eat the bankers”

“Banker, rhymes with ?”

Sarah Brown will have had an anxious early morning.

Her husband’s attempt to be the great fixer of the financial crisis and best friend of the United States at the same time was a big ask, but how was she going to handle the visit of Michelle Obama?

This was the first time Sarah had been called upon to host her new opposite number from The White House. And it wasn’t all smiling outside Downing Street either – the pair had to visit a cancer care centre as well and – horrors – meet Her Majesty the Queen.

Michelle is only three months younger than Sarah, but she is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, is the taller of the two by some distance and is famously well dressed.

She was on the cover of Vogue magazine last month and is constantly being compared to Jackie Kennedy.

So what does Sarah wear?

The choice was a smart, dark blue suit – she looked frightfully important and every bit the hostess of the world’s 20 most important nations.

Michelle went for a more dressed-down look – she was wearing a knee-length lime green skirt and a patterned white sparkly top. Crucially – and this may have been a deliberate gesture towards Sarah – she was covering up her famously toned arms, which fashion experts reckon is her best attribute.

But there’s a nagging thought: Was Sarah bold enough? She looked very smart of course, but is smart stylish?

“I have to say that Sarah played it very safe. Michelle is much more stylish with her combination of colour and textures — it seems that she is on show and sparkling,” says Michelle Shakallis, a London high street fashion designer.

“Sarah has gone for what will just blend in and look as boring as a man in a suit. Dark tights and shoes also reflect this. She does not want to have her figure or fashion on show here,” Shakallis adds.

Sarah cannot be blamed for making sure she did not attract headlines for the wrong reasons, but her lack of confidence is not befitting of our ‘first lady’. She should have had more of a go. Maybe she’s saving herself for tomorrow’s big event.

Still, at least Carla (Sarkozy) didn’t show up.

He loves the Queen and the British people. Truth be told, President Obama was always going to be a hit on his first overseas trip.

But Gordon Brown probably could not believe his luck. The prime minister just could not stop grinning as he stood next to the new president at a news conference in the Foreign Office ahead of the G20 summit.

He must have always been hoping for a bit of the Obama magic to rub off on him and revive his battered ratings but he can't have expected the ringing endorsement he got.

Tony Blair and George W Bush. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Britain has always liked to make much of the special relationship between it and America and any doubts it was in danger under Obama could be put to rest this week.

Obama looked on intently as Brown made his opening statement, referring to him by title.

But the formality dropped as soon as it was Obama's turn, as he thanked his hosts "Gordon and Sarah" and said he had been discussing dinosaurs with their two sons.

The United States and United Kingdom have always stuck together, he said. That's why he was pleased that his first overseas trip was to visit Brown.

Brown's face immediately lit up. Soon he was calling the president "Barack", joking that he was keen to introduce him to
his friends in the British press.

Even a question about Brown's regular remark that the crisis was made in America passed without a hitch, as Obama readily accepted the United States had to share some of the blame.

Asked what advice he would give to Brown on winning an election, Obama said: "The only advice I would give him Gordon is the same advice I gave myself -- good policies are good politics."

But the presidential hand on Brown's back as the two men left the podium may be the biggest helping hand of all.

From the cosy fireside chats and walks in the woods of 30 years ago, world summitry has expanded beyond all recognition, with this week’s G20 meeting in London being billed in some quarters as the biggest gathering of leaders since 1945.

But the problems now are of course much bigger too. Long gone are the days when a few soothing words about co-operation on currencies would be enough to declare a summit a success.

This one, Gordon Brown hopes, will produce a “grand bargain”  that will lay the foundations for a new global economic order, and in the process improve his own domestic political fortunes.

But the run-up to the summit has revealed fundamental differences in what the participants want to achieve — for a resume of what is actually likely to emerge click on our full coverage page.

What is your opinion on this week’s meeting? Is it just expensive diplomatic grandstanding or are the world’s economic problems now so severe that only a conference of such size is appropriate? And what would you like to see come of it?

By Rosalba O’Brien

I’ll tell the truth. When I went to preview tonight’s royal banquet at Britain’s Buckingham Palace, being held as part of the pomp accompanying the state visit of the Mexican president Felipe Calderon, I expected to be writing something on the lines of ‘Credit crunch? What credit crunch?’ - not for the global aristocracy, diplomatic corps and oil company bosses in attendance.

The truth, however, is something rather more ordinary.

Sure, the banquet room is lavish enough, with its giant bouquets, golden tableware, classical carvings and gilded ceiling. It’s certainly a bit bigger than my living room, what with the military band on the mezzanine and all.

But it’s not really so different from a bit of a knees up at the Dog and Duck. The food - pan fried halibut, medallions of beef, beans and potatoes and charlotte made with Balmoral redcurrants - would not look out of place on a pub’s Sunday dinner menu, royal estate fruit not withstanding.
The chairs may have had a lick of gold paint but they look as hard and uncomfortable as any canteen seating; Prince Charles has a red velvet cushion on his seat for his bad back.
A familiar sound drowns out the rehearsing pipers. It’s one of the royal staff, giving the dining room a final whip round with the hoover before dinner.

Preview over, the press corps is hustled back down fluorescent-lit stairwells and out to a functionary ante-room with the same portraits of the royals you see in hospitals and police stations. Back to our lives - that suddenly don’t seem so ordinary.