Niigata (Japan), May 11: Financial leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies are discussing ways to support Ukraine and pressure Russia to end the war as they meet in Japan starting on Thursday.
Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, was participating online in the first session of the G-7 talks in Niigata, a port city on the Japan Sea coast. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the G-7 nations “will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes” to end the conflict. The leaders will be mulling ways to prevent Russia and other countries from circumventing sanctions against Moscow for its invasion, Japanese Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki told reporters.
“We have taken a wave of actions in the past few months to crack down on evasion. And my team has travelled around the world to intensify this work,” Yellen said.
The war and its toll on the global economy, debt crises in developing countries and a stalemate in Washington over the national debt are topping the agenda of the three days of talks by finance ministers and central bank governors of G-7 countries and others invited to attend.
Despite the wide range of topics due for consideration, from climate change to debt relief to digital currencies, the standoff over the US debt ceiling and a potential default loomed as a major potential threat to the global economy.
Speaking before the closed-door meetings began, Yellen said one of her priorities was to emphasize the importance of resolving the crisis. “A default is frankly unthinkable,” she told reporters. “America should never default. It would rank as a catastrophe.” Japan’s central bank governor, Kazuo Ueda, echoed that sentiment. If the United States defaults on its debt, “it will become a big move and a big problem, and I think that the Fed alone, for example, may not be able to counteract it,” said Ueda, who took the helm of the Bank of Japan last month.
He said he trusted the US government would do its best to avoid such a situation.
US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he and congressional leaders had a “productive” meeting on Tuesday on trying to raise the nation’s debt limit. They will meet again Friday to try to avert the risk as soon as June 1 of an unprecedented government default if lawmakers in the divided Congress don’t agree to raise the debt ceiling. (AP)
