YOKOHAMA, Japan — Stephen Harper tried to put a positive spin on the twin Asian summits that struggled in vain to produce a gameplan for the global economy’s long-term recovery.
The APEC summit in Japan concluded Sunday with the 21 leaders vowing to continue working towards freer trade, and promising to refrain from anything that might spark a currency war.
At the earlier G20 summit in Korea, the leaders pledged to continue talking about how to ensure their currencies and trade balances don’t stray too far into dangerous territory.
But neither summit came close to delivering the “bold” action Harper had called for on the eve of the meetings to keep the global economy from drifting back to the brink.
“The necessity of dealing with medium-term questions of global imbalances and exchange rates — those do have to be tackled over time,” Harper told reporters.
“They don’t have to be tackled this month or next month in order to avert any kind of cataclysm.”
Harper said Canada’s budget won’t be affected by the loss of momentum in talks to shore up the global economy— even though a strong Canadian dollar is likely to hurt exports at a time when the Canadian recovery is shaky.
“I don’t see budgetary implications in terms of the spring,” Harper said, adding that the economic assumptions his officials use are conservative, and have taken into account global turmoil.
Instead, he’s urging the public to take a long term view of the situation and understand that leaders are moving towards freer trade, while also making plans to address destabilizing trade and investment balances.
“It’s not a problem we can solve in one meeting,” Harper said.
Still, the Asian whirlwind of summitry that concluded on Sunday did highlight one inescapable fact: diplomacy cannot keep up with finance.
The 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group said all the right things as they wrapped up their two-day summit in Japan.
They committed to a long-term strategy to boost growth in the Pacific Rim.
They promised to keep working on free trade, and on removing protectionist trade barriers that were thrown up during the recent financial crisis.
And most importantly, they fully backed the declaration made days earlier at the G20 summit in Seoul, Korea.
There, as in Yokohama, leaders said they would refrain from a currency war, and move towards allowing exchange rates to float freely.
They also pledged to look for ways to bring bloated trade and investment imbalances under control — a promise meant to reassure the world that the U.S. and China would confront their economy-distorting practices.
“We recognize that our first priority is to ensure a durable recovery in private sector demand,” APEC leaders said in their declaration.
But the leaders’ words also made it clear that any changes would be slow in coming.
China said it would allow its currency to slowly appreciate — a bit at a time, and the United States said it would reduce its deficit — again, over time.
All the leaders pledged to restructure their economies so that the middle class would see greater prosperity and participate in the global economy.
But the leaders were again talking about reforms that often take years to have an effect.
And even as the leaders issued their communiques and made their public statements about the need to put the world on a stable growth track, signs of sovereign debt crisis were rearing their ugly head again in Europe.
Ireland is being pressured to accept a massive bailout from the European Union to stave off a debt crisis that is already impacting stocks and bonds in several other E.U. nations.
And as Washington begins a new round of quantitative easing — a bond purchasing program that amounts to printing money — currencies around the world have trembled, throwing into question plans for export-led recoveries.
“If you can figure out how to make a trade out of anything that came out of the G20 summit — if your world was rocked in any way by the ’Seoul Action Plan’ — we invite you to let us know about it,” says economist Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics in a note to clients.
“Overall, we say this summit yielded no results on anything, and it was a waste of time and money.”