Hours before she left for London on Friday, the German leader said that "we do not think much of the idea of a new package of measures to underpin the economy."
Difference turned all the more apparent ahead of the G20 finance minister meeting near London, with the United States, Britain and Japan favoring more stimulus spending, while European leaders focusing more on tougher regulations as the best way out of the current global economic crisis.
One day earlier on Thursday, Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a joint press conference in Berlin that "Germany and France will send a common signal at this summit."
That signal, in a direct rebuttal to US calls for more spending, was "spending even more is not the issue, the issue is to put in place a regulatory system to prevent the economic catastrophe that the world is experiencing from being repeated."
European countries insisted that their stimulus packages were already enough and the more important thing was to deliver such packages and had regulatory measures in place against similar crisis from erupting out of the Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
US President Barack Obama, who enacted a 787 billion-US dollar stimulus bill last month, seemed to take a step back from his support of more stimulus on the European, indicating that the United States was not attending the G20 to negotiate a "specific commitment" on the economy.
Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs said "we are not going to negotiate some specific economic percentage or commitment," insisting instead "we must manage and overcome the current economic crisis, and take steps to prevent future crisis from happening to the global economy."
Though the summit might not end up like what a British expert put as "going to achieve nothing," what the White House has said recently, and what Brown said at his joint press conference with Merkel, showed that leaders across the Atlantic were trying to downplay the upcoming G20 meeting.
The meeting might be successful in bringing leaders together to address such issues concerning the "shadow banks" and tax havens within the scope of global financial regulation system as well as trade issues, but high hope for a coordinated action for more stimulus spending is apparently tuning down.
While Brown said that "each country can help the other by announcing similar financial measures," Chancellor Alistair Darling was also trying to manage expectations ahead of the April 2 summit, as he said "we should not expect to achieve complete consensus overnight."
Darling said on Friday, the first day of a closed-door meeting of the G20 finance ministers, that "it is important to be realistic about what could be achieved at the next month G20 summit."
(Xinhua News Agency March 16, 2009)