Global leaders to meet in Seoul for G20
Posted November 10, 2010 9:43 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
SEOUL, South Korea — Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama have arrived in Seoul, South Korea, for a two-day G20 summit, which gets underway on Thursday.
The aim of the summit is to boost employment, spur economic growth, and avoid a harmful currency war.
The G20 talks are expected to be tense. Leaders are poised to agree in principle to make sure their trade, investment and fiscal balances don’t go too much into the red or the black.
But several emerging market countries are suspicious of recent U.S. Federal Reserve moves to pump $600 billion (U.S.) into a bond-buying program — essentially printing money. Obama has defended the move by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Obama arrived Wednesday night in the capital of Seoul after spending less than a day in Indonesia, where he lived for four years as a boy. He met with Indonesia’s president, toured the country’s largest mosque and delivered a speech at the University of Indonesia.
Harper plans to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony in South Korea, along with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
World leaders will then travel to Yokohama, Japan, on the weekend to talk free trade and economic growth with the other 20 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum.
