NYT: US, Impatient Over China's Progress on Currency, Looks to IMF for Help

The United States is increasingly looking to the International to hold countries like China accountable for “rebalancing” the global economy, a Treasury Department official said Tuesday. Exchange rates are expected to be a major topic when finance ministers gather here this weekend for the annual meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank. In a briefing Tuesday, a senior Treasury official said the United States was looking to the I.M.F. to ensure that countries contribute to “strong, sustainable and balanced growth” — the mantra adopted when leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers, including President Obama, gathered in Pittsburgh in September 2009 to coordinate the world’s emergence from the financial crisis. In practical terms, the slogan means that export-oriented economies like China, Japan and Germany should stimulate domestic demand while heavily indebted countries, like the United States, should reduce their trade and budget deficits, by saving and investing more and borrowing and spending less. But while the world’s biggest economies have adopted those goals in principle, achieving them in practice has proved difficult.