TORONTO — Hours after Congress reached agreement on a plan to restructure the American financial system, President Obama began meeting with world leaders on Friday counting on the deal to give momentum to his administration’s efforts to forge a consensus on restoring global economic growth.
As leaders of the world’s biggest economies settled in for meetings at a lakeside resort in Ontario, American and European officials played down talk of a growing rift between them on the scope and timing of fiscal belt-tightening.
A senior official in the Obama administration said on Friday that the leaders of the Group of 8 countries had expressed a “broad consensus” on the need to balance deficit and debt reduction with continued support for economies still suffering from high unemployment. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has been the strongest proponent of austerity measures, echoed that description of the talks.
The administration cited Congress’s deal on financial restructuring as evidence of its commitment to solving thorny economic problems. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters that “now we lead the world in financial reform.” Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said, “The progress that the United States has made will be important in driving the world not just to agreements here, but to conclusions on financial regulation within the timeframe we’ve been looking at.”
Even so, the effort to present a unified stance will be tested here in subsequent meetings among the larger Group of 20 countries on Saturday and Sunday. This is the fourth G-20 summit gathering since the financial crisis reached its height in 2008.
One of the issues dividing the G-20 members is a proposal for a tax on banks, intended in part to help pay for the financial crisis. Japan’s new government indicated on Friday that it might not be opposed to such a tax. The United States, Britain, France and Germany support such a tax, while Canada, Australia and most of the big emerging economies oppose the proposal.
Also unclear is whether the G-20 countries will meet a self-imposed deadline — their next gathering in November, in Seoul, South Korea — for a deal on higher capital and liquidity requirements for the world’s giant banks. For weeks now, there has been speculation that the G-20 countries would delay a timetable for enacting those requirements by 2012.
But perhaps the biggest area of potential disagreement remained how, and when, indebted countries, including the United States, should pull back the extraordinary spending programs they undertook to help their economies.
In an essay published Friday in The Globe and Mail, Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, suggested that budget cutting was a prerequisite for jump-starting economic growth. “Of course, there must be the flexibility for countries to act, taking account of their own national circumstances,” he wrote. “But I believe we must each start by setting out plans for getting our national finances under control.”
That view seemed to be in tension with the stance of President Obama, who cautioned in a letter last week that countries should not move too quickly to cut their stimulus efforts. He warned of past episodes “when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn and resulted in renewed economic hardships and recession.”
Days later, Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, argued in their own letter that heavily indebted countries needed to move swiftly to consolidate their balance sheets. Daniel Schwanen, an economist with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a research organization based in Waterloo, Ontario, warned that “mud-slinging risks getting worse as countries seek to implement ‘exit strategies’ from the recent extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus.”
But Ángel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, called the choice between stimulus spending and deficit reduction “a false dilemma,” saying that both were necessary.
Mr. Obama called on the other G-20 leaders to maintain the unity they showed in summit meetings in London and Pittsburgh last year.
“We need to act in concert for a simple reason: This crisis proved, and events continue to affirm, that our national economies are inextricably linked,” Mr. Obama said on the White House lawn before leaving for Toronto. Upon landing, he quickly boarded helicopter for the Muskoka region of Ontario, where the G-8 leaders met at a resort in Huntsville, a bucolic village.
Although the G-8 has been effectively replaced by the G-20, the smaller group’s members remain the biggest sources of aid for poor countries. The issue of lagging aid to these countries was one of the primary topics of discussion Friday.
The Obama administration has pressed the other G-8 countries to follow up on the group’s past promises. Most notably, the G-8 has not fulfilled a pledge it made in 2005 to increase development aid by about $50 billion by 2010.
Mr. Harper, the Canadian prime minister, on Friday pledged 1.1 billion Canadian dollars in new spending to improve global maternal and child health. The Obama administration made a two-year, $1.3 billion pledge for this initiative, but it is subject to Congressional approval.
Partly as an effort to maintain its relevance, the G-8 has tried to shed its reputation as a club of rich countries. In Huntsville, about 140 miles north of Toronto, the G-8 leaders met with leaders of seven African countries and with the leaders of Colombia, Haiti and Jamaica.
Naoto Kan, the new prime minister of Japan, encountered Mr. Obama for the first time since assuming the position, as did Mr. Cameron, Britain’s new leader.
Mr. Obama was scheduled to have at least six one-on-one meetings with world leaders during his stay in Canada.
But except for Mr. Cameron, all of the confirmed bilateral meetings were with Asian leaders, in a reflection of Asia’s role in leading the global economic recovery.