Finance ministers from leading industrialized nations on Feb. 7 vowed to continue epic deficit spending to bolster a fragile global recovery at the end of G7 talks in Canada's far north. G7 delegates from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States were joined by officials from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission.
Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told a closing press conference that he and his G7 counterparts "need to continue to deliver the stimulus to which we are mutually committed, and look ahead to exit strategies."
Measures to shore up the global economy have proved costly, and while the world's richest nations have promoted diverging economic and financial policies, the ministers agreed that investing in their economies remained vital in order to avoid backsliding.
"We have to make sure as not to undermine the global recovery," said U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
"We're absolutely committed to maintaining support for our economies until the recovery is firmly established," echoed Alistair Darling, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer. "We achieved a lot in 2009," he said. "The risk of 2010 is the world will forget just how serious the situation was and what more remains to be done."
Concern over soaring public debts, which cast doubt on the recovery and caused market turmoil in recent days, was to top the agenda but ended up being pigeonholed at the talks, which presented no new directions for the Group of Seven industrialized nations.
The state of the public coffers in Spain and Portugal has been causing growing unease, with investors fearing a scenario similar to the budget crisis gripping Greece. Greece has been placed under unprecedented EU surveillance as it attempts to implement austerity measures to slash its massive debt and a 12.7% public deficit, while Portugal's deficit hit 9.3% last year, its highest since 1974.
European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet said last week that the high deficit and debt in some countries was placing an "additional burden" on monetary policy and undermining the bloc's stability and growth pact.
The G7 nations' combined debt has reached a whopping $30 trillion amid spending to keep their economies afloat over the last year.
On Feb. 5, the euro tumbled to its lowest level in almost a year.
Flaherty later commented that Greece must "stick to its plan" to solve its debt woes and would be "backed" by the eurozone. "We understand collectively that it's in all our interests that countries return to good economic health as soon as they can," he said.
The G7 ministers also agreed to eliminate Haiti's debt, to "continue to work closely" on banking reforms and to push China to float its currency in line with a policy established in Istanbul in October.
The value of the Chinese yuan, which has effectively been pegged to the U.S. dollar since mid-2008, has been a bone of contention between Beijing and its Western trading partners, who say it is kept low to boost exports and has led to a massive trade surplus with the West. Japan's Finance Minister Naoto Kan also said at the talks he feared a "bubble" was emerging in China, whose economy is poised to overtake Japan this year as the world's second largest.
The G7 meeting had kicked off on Friday with dog sledding on Frobisher Bay and a "fireside chat" that harkened to its beginnings at a forest retreat south of Paris in 1975.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2010
