Secretary Geithner to meet with G20 leaders
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is heading to Paris with a message to European leaders about how to solve the economic crisis.
Steve Chiotakis: Treasury secretary Tim Geithner is to travel to Paris tomorrow, for a meeting of the G20 finance ministers. The U.S., he says, will keep pressuring the Europeans to resolve their banking crisis — and do it fast.
A preview of the meeting, and reaction from European leaders now, from Marketplace’s Alisa Roth.
Alisa Roth: In an interview with Bloomberg News, Geithner was clear on the message he’ll deliver to the Europeans.
Timothy Geithner: They have to put in place a much more substantial, much more powerful response if they’re going to achieve their objectives.
Those objectives being to help their member countries change.
This will be Geithner’s third trip to Europe in the last five weeks. Last month, he traveled to Poland, where he pushed European leaders to put aside their differences so they could get “catastrophic risks” out of the market. He also suggested the Europeans look at what American policy makers did in response to the financial crisis here in 2008.
For their part, the Europeans have bristled at the idea of taking advice from the Americans. Austria’s finance minister said she found it odd that, given the state of the U.S. economy, the U.S. would try to tell the Europeans how to solve their crisis.
In New York, I’m Alisa Roth for Marketplace.