US ‘frankly raised’ disagreements with China at first financial working group meeting

U.S. officials “frankly raised areas of disagreement” with China at the first meeting of a new financial working group, where financial stability, supervision and regulation were discussed, the U.S. Treasury said on Wednesday.

Attendees included senior officials from China’s central bank and the U.S. Treasury Department, according to a Treasury statement.

“The two-hour virtual meeting included a substantive and wide-ranging discussion on domestic and global financial stability, financial supervision and regulation, sustainable finance, and anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism,” the Treasury said.

The financial working group and a parallel economic working group were launched last month after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing in July aimed at fostering regular communications between the world’s two largest economies.

The economic working group, led by senior officials from the Treasury and China’s Finance Ministry held its first meeting on Monday.

Yellen met with People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng on Oct. 13 on the sidelines of International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, and discussed debt issues plaguing developing economies and the global financial architecture.

Yellen told Reuters in an interview that the discussion included a U.S.-backed plan to increase IMF quota-based lending resources without changes to its shareholding structure. China has been reluctant to support the funding increase without an increase in its IMF shares, but Yellen said the “equi-proportional” quota increase is “pretty likely” to succeed.