As the politicians from the UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy gather in the US capital city key two key international finance organisations are calling for other giants like Russia and China to be included.
The International Monetary Fund, the world's leading finance advisory body to governments, is warning that economies outside the G7 need to be included in a global rescue plan.
'The G7 has already done a lot. Consultation discussions during the last year have been very useful but we need to go beyond the G7,' said IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
He even went as far to suggest that it is not just a matter of consulting countries outside the G7 but of actually including them. 'There are other countries which are obviously major players in the world economy. We need to look to the extension of the G7 to G11 or G12,' he said.
'In any case you have 160 countries which will remain outside and most of them, if not all of them, have a role to play. This is now a crisis which concerns everybody on earth and we need the co-operation, the discussion, and the opinion of what other countries may say.
The view is backed by the World Bank. 'The G7 is not working. We need a better group for a different time. It should be expanded to include the top 14 global economies to tackle development issues as well as the financial turmoil plaguing richer nations,' said World Bank President Robert Zoellick.
A statement is expected in Washington following the crisis meeting. Two key areas to be addressed are haemmoraging stock markets, property markets and the lack of liquidity in the banking sector.
So far waves of rescue packages have failed to halt global panic. As stock markets continued to fall today analysts were giving a very grim outlook.
