US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the global economic recovery depends on a balance between more public spending and budget cuts, signaling a possible compromise with Europe ahead of Saturday's meeting of Group of 20 (G20) leaders, according to dpa. While the global recovery from last year's recession had to remain a top priority for world leaders, Geithner said countries were emerging from the crisis at different speeds. It was up to each to implement the right measures to prevent another economic collapse. The United States and European Union had sparred ahead of the summit over the right policy course to keep the recovery going. The US has pushed for more stimulus measures, while a number of EU countries have already announced fiscal austerity plans. "The scars of this crisis are still with us. So, this summit must be fundamentally about growth," Geithner said as he arrived in Toronto, which is hosting the G20 summit. But "we have to find the right balance." "This will require different strategies in different countries," he said, noting that the commonalities between the US and EU outweighed the differences. "We are coming out of the crisis at different speeds." The G20 meets Saturday and Sunday to discuss the state of the global economy and prospects for financial regulatory reform to prevent another crisis like the one that nearly brought down Wall Street in 2008. "I hope we can build on the progress we made at last year's G20 summits by coordinating our global financial reform efforts to make sure a crisis like the one from which we are still recovering never happens again," Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio address. Obama lauded the US Congress for agreeing on an overhaul of financial regulation and touted a tax on major US banks as the next task on his agenda. The US is unlikely to back Europe's call for the bank levy to be enacted by all G20 members. The two houses of Congress agreed Friday on a common version of the financial legislation and could approve the entire package next week. Geithner said there was unlikely to be agreement at the summit on a common path forward on financial reform. A deal on issues such as capital requirements for banks was more likely at the next meeting in November in South Korea.
