GENEVA, December 13: The long wait for the United States to decide whether it wanted to be part of a new financial services package ended in the early hours of Saturday when the World Trade Organisation announced that all countries were on board for a deal that would liberalise the global banking, insurance and securities trading sector.

"We've got it," said a beaming World Trade Organisation chief Renato Ruggiero around 2 am today. He called this year a "golden year" for the international trading system. This is the third accord reached by the WTO in less than 12 months, following agreements on information technology and trade in telecommunications. Today's deal ends a 15-year search for an aggrement in what is the fastest growing sector of economic activity accounting for over 5 per cent of total world employment and trillions of dollars rushing around in a world wired to sound. The pact which binds over 70 countries has to be ratified by January 30, 1990 and will enter into force 30 after.

But more than the mega-billion dollar potential that the deal unleashes and more than any stability that rules can inject in frenzied markets, if there is one message coming out of these negotiations it is that the United States and its lobbies have the power to break or make the international trading system. The corollary to that is the simple fact that in these as well as most other WTO negotiations, the multilateral system depends on unilateral decisions that the United States can take. For all other countries, the entire week and especially the last two days was reduced to non-negotiations and long waits for word from Washington while the WTO chief reduced his activities to frenzied contacts with American negotiators in a desperate bid to secure the deal.

President Clinton immediately welcomed the pact saying it would ensure market access in sectors where the United States led the world. "Since I took office, I have been committed to tearing down barriers to American goods and services exports... today's agreement by over 70 countries to liberalise trade in financial services will ensure market access in sectors where we lead the world - banking, securities and insurance," he said. One note of dissent came from Egypt's ambassador in Geneva, Munir Zahran. "In fact it is one way traffic... most developing countries will open their markets. But most developing countries cannot compete in their (industrialised) markets. They will come here but we won't be able to go there," Zahran told journalists.

Thai envoy Krik Krai, speaking for the ASEAN was more phlegmatic. "We've done what we could under the difficult circumstances in our region," he told a final WTO meeting to endorse the pact.

The stakes are access to as much as $1.2 trillion in daily foreign exchange transactions for industrialsed countries, the financial sector earns $1 trillion a year. That is to say that every 20th dollar or five per cent of national income is earned in the financial sector where jobs have grown by fifty per cent in some industrialised countries. In the 29-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a developed countries' club, the finanancial sector employs 13 million people and anaylsts say this is the fastest growing sector of international economic activity.