Washington, June 23 (IANS) Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has suggested that as nations recovering from global recession undertake fiscal consolidation, fiscal exits could be staggered and be country specific, depending on market conditions in each country.
Mukherjee, who led the high-level official team at the India-US CEOs Forum here Tuesday, made the suggestion at a separate meeting with his counterpart, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as they discussed bilateral issues and the outlook for the global economy.
Meeting ahead of the Toronto summit of the Group of 20 leading economies, including India, they also discussed the euro-zone crisis and how this would impact on the global economy, the Indian embassy said.
They discussed issues relating to fiscal consolidation and Mukherjee suggested that fiscal exits could be staggered and be country specific, depending on market conditions in each country, it said.
At the CEOs’ Forum, he noted ‘what started as a sub-prime crisis in 2007-2008, became a financial crisis that affected banks and private corporations. And then it spread to the real economy.’
‘Governments around the world rallied to protect the banks and corporations. Unfortunately, now some of the governments themselves seem to have got infected,’ Mukherjee said ‘referring to the difficult sovereign debt situation that our friends in Europe are facing today.’
Commerce & Industry Minister Anand Sharma also separately met US Trade Representative Ron Kirk and ‘discussed issues relating to India-US trade relations,’ the embassy said without giving any details.
Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia also separately met US Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack to discuss progress in India-US Agriculture cooperation, it said.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
