Participants agreed on an exit strategy at the meeting in London. They believe that governments should continue implementing necessary financial support measures and expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, consistent with price stability and long-term fiscal sustainability, until recovery is secured. The announcement showed that governments would soon be working on how to retreat from the market rather than continue money injection into the market.

Prisoner's dilemma

The G20 has realized the risks of a disorder in withdrawing extraordinary fiscal, monetary, and financial sector support. As a result, it reiterated that members should work with the IMF and the Financial Stability Board to develop cooperative and coordinated exit strategies. They have also recognized that the scale, timing and sequencing of actions will vary across countries and across the types of policy measures.

The exit process must be transparent, credible and efficient. However, it will not be easy to forge a "cooperative game" scenario, while the "prisoner's dilemma" has always been the norm in the game theory. Prisoner's dilemma means two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it merely difficult or expensive, not necessarily impossible, to coordinate their activities to achieve cooperation.

Economic relations between major powers will definitely turn into a prisoner's dilemma. For example, developed countries and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries are gaming about their respective stakes in reforming international financial institutions in a bid to seek more power in deciding game rules.

The central bank of Israel, meanwhile, took the lead in raising benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 0.75 percent on August 24. The Economist recently published an article predicting Australia and Norway might also be the first few countries to hike interest rates in an attempt to maximize the benefit of their own countries.

Leaders of the UK, Germany and France called for taking concerted efforts to impose a cap on the amount bankers can receive in future bonus payments. However, their appeal is not echoed by the United States, which still agrees on high payments as an incentive to maintain New York's status as the global financial center.