US ‘frankly raised’ disagreements with China at first financial working group meeting
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Attendees of the meeting included senior officials from China’s central bank and the US Treasury Department.
PHOTO: REUTERS
WASHINGTON - US officials “frankly raised areas of disagreement” with China at the first meeting of a new financial working group, where financial policy matters and cooperation on common challenges were discussed, said the United States Treasury on Wednesday.
Attendees included senior officials from China’s central bank and the US Treasury Department, according to a Treasury statement.
“The two-hour virtual meeting included a substantive and wide-ranging discussion on domestic and global financial stability, financial supervision and regulation, sustainable finance, and anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism,” the Treasury said.
The financial working group and a parallel economic working group were launched in September, after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing in July.
They are aimed at fostering regular communications between the world’s two largest economies.
The economic working group, led by senior officials from the Treasury and China’s Ministry of Finance, held its first meeting on Monday.
Dr Yellen met People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng on Oct 13 on the sidelines of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, where they discussed debt issues plaguing developing economies and the global financial architecture.
She told Reuters that the discussion included a US-backed plan to bolster IMF funding, increasing IMF quota-based lending resources without changing its shareholding structure.
China has been reluctant to support the funding increase without a boost in its IMF shares, but Dr Yellen said the “equi-proportional” quota increase is “pretty likely” to succeed. REUTERS