The G20 summit system has successfully controlled financial crises, restoring global financial stability after the shock from the US in 2008 and preventing the third shock from Europe in 2010 from resulting in a global contagion. After the G20 finance ministers effectively responded to the Asian-turned-global financial crisis in 1999, they failed to prevent the greater American-turned-global financial crisis in 2008, yet their leaders together responded effectively to it, then prevented the escalating euro crisis from going global, and finally reduced the likelihood of another global financial crisis emanating from a systemically significant country. Since 2013, the G20 has also enhanced economic equality between rich and poor countries, but has not fully made up for the loss in economic growth experienced in 2008 to 2013 or eliminated the socioeconomic scarring created during that period.

This increasing success was driven by the changing conditions of the forces identified in the systemic hub model of G20 governance. The first was steadily escalating shocks in finance and economics, and related fields, from 1997 to 2012. The sources of these shifted from emerging Asia to a newly-vulnerable United States, Europe and then China in a much reduced form. With such shocks exposing and equalizing the vulnerability of the major powers, the formal multilateral organizations created by the United States and its Atlantic allies in the 1940s and their subsequent informal supplements such as the G7 could not cope. Among its many international institutional competitors, the G20 alone contained, as full, equal members, the countries that increasingly possessed the collectively predominant and internally equalizing capabilities required to respond effectively. They increasingly, if unevenly, became more internationally and domestically open and interconnected financial systems, economies and societies, albeit with some setbacks after 2013. The often high domestic political cohesion of members further helped the G20 become a group its participants valued as an institution, operating at the hub of an expanding network of global summit governance for a now-globalized world.