U.S., Asian finance ministers see common goals

The United States and Asia are inextricably linked and must work together to build a more stable economy, top U.S., Indonesian and Singaporean finance officials wrote in an editorial to be published on Thursday.
In the editorial prepared for the Wall Street Journal Asia, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and Singaporean Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that as U.S. households save more, others must take steps to spur domestic growth.
The United States has pushed for a more balanced global economy that is less dependent on debt-powered consumption in the United States. At a meeting of the Group of 20 major industrialized and emerging nations in Pittsburgh in September, leaders endorsed a U.S.-backed plan to rebalance the world economy.
Washington wants China in particular to take steps to strengthen its social safety net to encourage spending at home, and to allow its yuan currency to appreciate more rapidly.
While the editorial did not name China, the finance leaders reiterated the need for currency exchange rates to be established by markets.
"Market-oriented exchange rates in line with economic fundamentals will be essential in assuring the resource and sectoral shifts to match and foster the new patterns of demand," they said.
Geithner was in Japan on Wednesday before heading to Singapore to join a meeting of finance ministers from the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) on Thursday.
The three finance leaders said they would work together at the APEC meeting on finding ways to shift the pattern of global growth to foster more U.S. savings and more growth in surplus countries such as China.
"The events of the last year have shown that our economies are bound together inextricably, and in more complex ways than we previously recognized," they wrote.
"APEC members must forge a partnership of common interests to produce strong and balanced growth among our economies. We must reinvigorate the framework of cooperation to ensure that relations between our nations are as positive and mutually productive in the future as they have been in the past."

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SATISH CHANDRA
PGDM III
SACTION A