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BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday she was going into the G-20 summit with a mixture of confidence and concern, renewing a call for world leaders to produce firm agreements on market reform.
"We will look very carefully at every period, every comma — we will see that very concrete agreements are made from which people cannot pull back," Merkel told reporters in Berlin before leaving for the summit in London.
Merkel said it was important that no financial market, financial product or institution be free from supervision or transparency in the future.
"I am traveling to London with a mixture of confidence and concern," she said.
Merkel voiced "concern on one hand over whether we really react to the serious situation, whether we instead try to push things aside and make them look better than they are; but confidence that, given the extremely difficult situation, we cannot stick our heads in the sand and must act."
Merkel backed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's insistence that he won't accept a "false compromise" from world leaders at the summit.
"What the French president has in view is that we should not dodge and make feeble compromises on the financial market constitution of the future," Merkel said. "I support him there."
Sarkozy also left open the possibility of walking out of the summit, but a spokesman for Merkel made clear that was not a course of action she would contemplate.
"The chancellor's experience has been that it makes sense at international conferences to participate in a concentrated way in the discussions and not leave the negotiating table," Thomas Steg told reporters. "Only those who take part in debates can help determine the results."
