Obama: Too early to implement exit strategies

L'AQUILA, July 10 (Xinhua) -- Although the market is showing signs of recovery, it is too early to implement exit strategies, U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday at a press conference after the Group of Eight (G8) Summit.

It seems that the world economy has avoided a collapse, but it is still in "a big trouble," Obama said.

According to a joint statement issued by G8 countries and five emerging economies, world leaders would begin to prepare exit strategies from the extraordinary stimulus measures taken to respond to the global financial crisis.

The statement said exit strategies would be adopted once recovery is assured, in a bid to ensure monetary and fiscal sustainability in the medium term.

Economists say advanced countries would witness a pace of recovery much slower than that of emerging economies, and it is too early to say when the exit strategies shall be implemented.

It is predicted that the U.S. economy would suffer a decline of 1.3 to 2 percent this year, while the British economy would contract about 4 percent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "reaching the bottom of the slump is not when you start with exit strategies. We need to choose a point where we've already got some way out of the trough."

Amid the global financial crisis, major economies and some emerging economies have adopted a series of aggressive fiscal and monetary measures to pull their economies out of the mire.

Therefore, in view of a foreseeable inflation, when and how to adopt exit strategies have become a major concern of these economies.