WASHINGTON (AFP) — World leaders at November 15 economic crisis talks in Washington will likely agree on an "action plan" including near-term steps to help fix the global economy, a senior US official said Wednesday.
The White House had long said that the Group of 20 nation summit would yield a statement of principles for tackling the troubles in concert, while other nations, notably France, had said the gathering must yield concrete steps.
"We think we may be able to agree not only on principles, but, second, on some actions that we can take in the near term, and third, taskings to ministers or relevant financial bodies to make recommendations about future actions," the US official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The summit will likely yield a set of principles and "to ensure that these principles are implemented we expect that the leaders will agree on an action plan identifying specific or some specific near-term implementation measures," said the official.
Those might include steps to increase transparency, improve risk management, coordinate among regulating authorities, and even the adoption of more consistent and convergent rules, in the areas like accounting or capitalization, the official said.
The November talks will bring together leaders of the Group of 20 rich countries and major developing economies to discuss cooperative measures for responding to the global economic meltdown and ways to prevent future crises.
The G20 includes the seven major industrialized nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and the United States -- plus Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey.
It also takes in the 27-nation European Union, represented by France, which holds the rotating EU presidency. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank also participate in its meetings.
The US official played down apparent differences between the United States and its European partners over the crisis, saying: "there is ... in fact much broader agreement than may at first appear."
At the same briefing, however, the official and another senior official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, appeared to resist European calls for expanding the International Monetary Fund's role or building new international financial institutions to prevent, or cope with, future crises.
"Indeed, we believe there is little support in Europe or elsewhere for empowering a single global authority to regulate all of the world's financial markets," the first official said.
"We certainly are open to thinking about the IMF needs to evolve to meet the changes and challenges of the global system," the second official said, while pouring cold water on Britain's call for boosting the fund's emergency funds.
The second official said the IMF has roughly 200 billion dollars in resources at hand, "and there's been no roll up of need that I've seen that comes anywhere near to surpassing that."
"So I think for the time being the IMF is well resourced but we need to continue to monitor that as the situation evolves," the second official said.
Asked about the possibility of building new international institutions, the official said: "It's hard to imagine something that radical unless you were saying you wanted to blow up the existing institutions and start from scratch."
Those comments appeared aimed at French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has called for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the international financial regime, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has pushed for adding to the IMF's 250-billion-dollar emergency bailout pot.
The British premier says hundreds of billions of extra dollars are needed to stop financial "contagion" spreading. The IMF is already bailing out Iceland, Ukraine and Hungary.
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