SEOUL, South Korea — President Obama, marking the start of a summit meeting that has already tested the limits of international cooperation, implored other world leaders on Wednesday to shift global economic demand away from its historic reliance on American consumption and borrowing.In a letter to other leaders of theGroup of 20 economic powers, released shortly after he arrived here, Mr. Obama tried to calm the currency tensions that have roiled global economic relations, though he did not mention by name the two most prominent sources of the tension: China’s foreign-exchange interventions and the Federal Reserve’s recent decision to inject $600 billion into the economy.
“We all now recognize that the foundation for a strong and durable recovery will not materialize if American households stop saving and go back to spending based on borrowing,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Yet no one country can achieve our joint objective of a strong, sustainable and balanced recovery on its own.”
In an op-ed article for the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal, the Treasury secretary,Timothy F. Geithner, joined Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the finance minister of Singapore, and Wayne Swan, the treasurer of Australia, in warning that a “two-track recovery will dominate the global economy for a long time to come” and will require new forms of cooperation.
Together, Mr. Obama’s letter and Mr. Geithner’s article laid out a strategy that combined an appeal to reason, an avoidance of confrontation and more than a little humility. The benefit of their approach, they said, would be higher overall growth in the long term.
But it remained to be seen whether China and Germany, the world’s two most powerful surplus economies, would take steps to curb their reliance on exports and their high rates of savings and to increase their relatively low consumption, as American officials argue is needed. In the run-up to the two-day meeting that begins Thursday, officials from both nations unleashed stinging criticism of the Fed, accusing the United States central bank of essentially playing tricks with its economy to prop up a flagging recovery.
Mr. Obama’s letter indirectly defended the Fed, buttressing his argument that the world needs a robust United States recovery even though it should no longer depend on the American consumer to serve as the mainstay of demand.
“A strong recovery that creates jobs, income and spending is the most important contribution the United States can make to the global recovery,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter. “The dollar’s strength ultimately rests on the fundamental strength of the U.S. economy.”
A few hours after Mr. Obama’s letter was released, the Commerce Department reported that American exports grew 0.3 percent in September while imports fell 1 percent. Exports through the first nine months of the year are up nearly 18 percent from the period a year.
“Our renewed focus on trade promotion is helping to grow exports, which are critical to our continued economic growth,” the commerce secretary, Gary Locke, said in a statement from Yokohama, Japan, where Mr. Obama is to travel on Friday evening for meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
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