Gordon Brown and Barack Obama outside No 10 today. Photograph: Sang Tan/APKatherine Baldwin
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 April 2009 11.50 BST
Gordon Brown today stood side by side with Barack Obama and announced that G20 leaders were "within a few hours" of agreeing a global deal for economic recovery.
At a joint press conference at the Foreign Office, the British prime minister and US president played down an apparent rift with France and Germany ahead of tomorrow's London summit.
"The separation between various parties involved has been vastly overstated," Obama said, adding he expected world leaders to reach an agreement tomorrow. "All of us here in London have a responsibility to act with a sense of urgency. Make no mistake we are facing the most severe economic crisis since world war two."
Brown suggested Britain and America would help bring world leaders together.
Later today Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, will throw down the gauntlet by staging their own joint press conference in London demanding the G20 summit usher in a new era of global regulation of banks, executive bonuses, hedge funds and offshore tax havens.
In what will be seen as a challenge to Obama, they will also insist nobody at the summit should discuss a fresh stimulus package, despite a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that "world trade is now in freefall".
Before Brown's meeting with Obama, Sarkozy said he would not tolerate "false compromises" at the summit and that the measures currently on the table were not acceptable to France and Germany.
"As of today, there is no firm agreement in place," Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio. "The conversation is going forward, there are projects on the table. As things stand at the moment, these projects do not suit France or Germany."
Asked about his call for countries to provide more fiscal stimulus, Obama said the US could not be expected to act alone to promote growth.
"It can't just be the United States as the engine. Everybody is going to have to pick up the pace," he said, adding that he believed other world leaders had recognised that.
Brown and Obama declined to give a timeframe for how long the economic crisis would last but said recovery would depend on how swiftly countries took action. The president, however, suggested people act out of hope and not fear.
"Despite the current hardships we are going to get through this," Obama said. "Basing decisions around fear is not the right way to go."
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