FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

It was a pleasure to host my G-7 colleagues here in Washington last night and this morning. I enjoyed our candid and productive discussions.

I am pleased to announce that yesterday, the G-7 nations for the first time jointly designated a list of individuals and an entity as financiers of terrorists, terrorist organizations and those who support them and blocked their assets. I want to thank my G7 colleagues for their close collaboration on these efforts. This marks an important step in our international efforts to increase information sharing and coordinate our counter terrorist financing efforts.

The unity with which the international community has tackled that goal is a message to the terrorists that our resolve is strong. The United States is extremely pleased to work with other nations to help ensure effective enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions. The United States is committed to providing needed technical assistance to continue our worldwide progress in severing links that terrorists use to finance their activities. There is still much to be done and we agreed this weekend to continue working to ensure that legitimate institutions, such as charities, NGOs, and hawala systems, are not misused by terrorists and their supporters.

We were all pleased to observe the economic recovery now taking hold in our economies. At the same time, we are mindful of downside risks that remain and remain committed to pursuing polices aimed at sustaining recovery and strengthening productivity growth. We also noted clear signs of recovery in emerging market economies. Argentina is still a key concern, however, and we urge the Argentine authorities to work closely with the IMF to put a comprehensive reform plan into place.

We also discussed the key priorities of crisis prevention and crisis resolution. First and most important, we all want to move from reacting to crises with repair efforts to a world in which all nations have investment grade sovereign debt. Even in that world, we would have occasional problems, and we need a predictable process for responding. We are releasing today an action plan to increase predictability and reduce uncertainty about official policy actions in the emerging markets - thereby creating the conditions for a sustained recovery of private investment in emerging markets. We will work together with emerging market countries and their creditors to incorporate new contingency clauses into debt contracts, while also continuing to explore with the IMF more sweeping, statutory steps to sovereign debt restructuring.

We are all dedicated to advancing development and combating poverty in the poorest nations. We reiterated our commitment to increasing the effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral development assistance, and to continuously monitoring and measuring its results. We also discussed the important issue of IDA grants and the need to come to a sensible resolution that supports effective development as soon as possible.