China and US relations stall more progress

G20 LEADERS have vowed to avoid currency manipulation and trade protectionism, but bad blood between China and the United States blocked deeper progress in rebalancing the skewed global economy.

After a stormy two-day summit, the leaders of the world’s biggest rich and emerging economies agreed in a declaration to craft “indicative guidelines” to reorient unbalanced trade between surplus and deficit nations.

Due to Chinese-led resistance to binding trade targets, that was far less ambitious than sought by the US as the world’s richest power nurses a hangover from its worst recession since the 1930s.