G20 MEET TO HIGHLIGHT CHINA’S WORLD FINANCE ROLE

NANJING: As finance mandarins from G-20 nations gather in China for a chat session on reforming global finance, Beijing’s efforts to nix discussion of its currency may be made easier by crises in Libya and Japan.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is chairing the G-20 this year, made a brief stop in Beijing on Wednesday evening in an effort to soothe China’s anger over US and European airstrikes aimed at enforcing a UN no-fly zone over strife-torn Libya.

After attending Thursday’s G-20 “seminar” of central bank governors and cabinet ministers on monetary issues in Nanjing, Sarkozy flies to Tokyo. There he will offer support for Japan’s effort to resolve a nuclear reactor crisis and overcome the destruction wrought by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which killed at least 11,000 people and left many thousands more missing.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his Chinese counterpart Vice Premier Wang Qishan, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and World Bank President Robert Zoellick also are attending.

Beijing has ruled out any major discussion of its own currency policies — viewed by Washington and other trading partners as a key factor in global economic imbalances — at the Nanjing meeting, saying the gathering is unofficial and informal and that its exchange rate policies are not on the agenda.

But disagreements over currencies and monetary policies are bound to shape the talks even if only indirectly, analysts said.
“There are differences of opinion between developed countries and developing countries over monetary issues,” said Zhang Xinfa, an economist at Galaxy Securities in Beijing, pointing to the stimulus-oriented policies in the US, Japan and Europe that Beijing has said are helping drive inflation in commodity and asset prices.
Agence France-Presse