Summary
24 April 2009
The financial crisis dominates meetings in Washington over the next three days. Finance ministers will meet amidst warnings that more needs to be done to tackle the problems in western banks.
Reporter:
Andrew Walker in Washington
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
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Report
This is the first major gathering of economic officials since the G20 leaders' summit in London three weeks ago and the head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been saying there is important business discussed then, that has not been fully done. Most pressing in his view, is cleaning up the mess in the banking systems, a priority, he thinks, for several G7 countries, plus Switzerland. He says there has been progress but it has been too slow.
The G20, and then meetings at the IMF and the World Bank, will be a chance for developing countries - caught up in a whirlwind that started elsewhere - to press the United States and European countries to do more.
But for his part, the US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is expected to say that there's a need for a balanced economic recovery where other countries are not dependent on spending by American consumers. One feature of the period before the crisis was rapid debt fuelled growth in spending in the US and some other developed economies which provided a market for exporters especially in Asia. But before any recovery takes hold most officials expect a long difficult period. They have been warned by the IMF that this year the global economy will probably contract for the first time since the Second World War.
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Vocabulary
- G20 leaders' summit
- an important formal meeting between finance ministers from 20 industrialised and developing countries
- pressing
- important and urgent
- cleaning up the mess
- dealing with a negative situation successfully
- caught up in a whirlwind that started elsewhere
- the developing countries were affected badly by a situation that happened because other countries' actions
- press
- put pressure on someone to do something
- crisis
- a situation that has reached a very difficult or dangerous point
- rapid debt-fuelled growth in spending
- spending money very quickly when you are in a lot of debt (you owe money to other people or banks)
- exporters
- businesses which sell goods to businesses or people in other countries
- takes hold
- happens, comes into effect
- contract
- become smaller
