President Obama won a clear victory over European opposition on several fronts Friday at the meeting of G-20 leaders in Pittsburgh.

While he may still be wrangling with Congress over contentious issues such as health care and cap-and-trade energy policy, Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner prevailed on such controversial issues as executive bonuses, raising bank capital, and reform of the voting structure of the International Monetary Fund.

Now the hard work of fleshing out general agreements into detailed policy initiatives will be sent back to teams of experts in national capitals and Basel, Switzerland, where the Bank for International Settlements helps draft bank regulations.

For example, the G-20 endorsed national regulatory oversight of executive bonuses at key financial firms, with pay tied to a bank’s capital and liquidity. France and Germany had been in favor of imposing strict pay caps on executives with international regulatory oversight to keep bankers from moving from one country to another to collect bigger pay packages. Although the European demands were papered over, Obama and Geithner manage to convince them that local limits on pay was still a significant accomplishment.

The G-20 backed Geithner’s less radical proposals for banks to avoid multiyear pay packages to executives. It also agreed that bonuses should be paid out over several years to avoid short-term risk taking and include clawbacks of incentive compensation when financial firms fail to produce positive results. The idea was to avoid large pay bonuses, as occurred at Merrill Lynch last year, when the company lost $27.6 billion

In another victory for the Obama team—it was the first time Obama has hosted an international summit—Geithner’s plan to force banks to increase capital was adopted, with a draft accord to be approved by the end of 2010 and full implementation achieved in 2012, which will meet industry demands for sufficient time to phase in the changes.

Some European nations opposed higher bank-capital requirements because their banks tend to have less reserves than U.S. banks and would have to raise more new capital. A new leverage measure of risk will be implemented by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which will work out the precise details of the new international rules on capital. But it will be left up to individual national regulators to implement the changes, which gives countries like France a chance to water it down. The United States already uses a measure of leverage to determine the health of banks.

Perhaps the biggest victory for Obama was the acceptance of his plan to make the G-20, which includes developing countries like China, India, and Brazil, the center of economic discussions from here on out. “The old system of international economic cooperation is over,’ British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said. Henceforth, the G-20 would become “the premier economic organization for dealing with economic management around the world.”

The G-20 was started in 1999 at the finance-minister level, but until this year the G-8 group of industrial nations—the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan, plus Russia—had been the primary venue for economic summits. Now, the G-8 will continue to meet, but will focus on international security issues while the G-20 deals with economics matters.

Toward that end, Obama proposed making the IMF more representative of the new global economic order. Currently, industrial nations control 57 percent of the votes at the IMF, while developing countries control 43 percent. That will now be changed to an even 50-50 split. The Europeans will give up some of their votes.

Obama also managed to get the G-20 to consider naming the IMF to monitor global trade imbalances and to provide “peer review” to correct them. Obama’s main target is China, which had a $280 billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year. According to this agreement, exporting countries will be encouraged to stimulate domestic demand and reduce exports, while trade-deficit countries like the U.S. will take steps to increase savings. The savings rate in the U.S. has already increased because of the recession.