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SECRETARY GEITHNER: We meet this week with finance ministers and central bank governors of the world, and then we convene in Korea in a few weeks for a meeting of the G-20, and then the heads of state come together in Korea in late November.

It’s worth noting at the beginning that this has been a remarkably effective period of cooperation on economic and financial issues. I think, the most productive era of cooperation we’ve seen in peace time. We came together in the crisis, in a moment of great peril for the system, and put in place an incredibly forceful package of classic fiscal measures, monetary policy, creative set of measures to stabilize our financial systems. We committed to keep our markets open and honored that commitment. We came together to embrace a set of very strong reforms of the global financial system and acted on that, not just with comprehensive financial reform in the United States of America, but with a new agreement on global capital standards negotiated last month by the world supervisors of central banks.

Now, these decisions required a lot of trust and a lot of political resolve, and they have been very effective in stopping the freefall and growth we saw around the world in the second half of 2008, and restarting global trade. Global trade now is almost back to pre-crisis levels, which is a remarkable achievement in such a short period of time. And each of our economies is stronger today than would otherwise have been the case because of the effectiveness of this joint strategy.

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