SEOUL, South Korea – America’s move to flood its sluggish economy with $600 billion of cash, has triggered alarm in capitals from Berlin to Beijing. This has created tensions over currencies and trade gaps which are growing before the summit of global leaders this week.
The Group of 20 developing and rich nations are attempting to reform the world economy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Two years ago the group’s leaders met for the first time. They set out an ambitious agenda to ensure stable economic growth and to strengthen financial supervision to prevent further meltdowns and to give developing countries more of a say in what’s going on.
The Federal Reserve’s decision to buy $600 billion of Treasury bonds over the next eight months helps tolower interest rates to spur growth and cut the high unemployment rate. However, this decision is complicating discussions on achieving those goals at the summit Thursday and Friday in Seoul
At the center of the discussions is the understanding that a decades-long global economic order centered on the U.S. buying exports from the rest of the world and running huge trade deficits while other countries such as China, Germany and Japan accumulate vast surpluses is no longer reasonable after the crisis.
The attempt to remake the world economy received some of its momentum from the rise of countries such as brazil, India, and China to become economic and political giants in their own right. The G-20 meetings themselves show the great changes since the crisis. They mark the end of a system in place since the 1940s in which the world economy was managed mainly by a small group of rich nations led by the United States, Europe and later Japan.