G20 summit begins, currencies set to dominate the agenda

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SEOUL, Nov 11 (Agencies): The world's leading economies have begun a summit in South Korea, with currency policies set to dominate the agenda.
There are fears the G20 meeting in Seoul could descend into a row between the US and China about so-called "currency wars" and trade imbalances.
However, US President Barack Obama and China's President Hu Jintao pledged to work together Thursday, following a rocky period of trade and currency spats coupled with diplomatic shadow-boxing in Asia.
The leaders, meeting in Seoul, put on a public show of comity in their seventh one-one-one talks since Obama took office, in an encounter expected to smooth the way for Hu's state visit to Washington in January.
US officials said the 80-minute meeting was dominated by divisions over exchange rate policy and the need to improve the atmosphere of the broader US-China relationship ahead of Hu's visit.
Obama said that it was "wonderful" to see Hu again, and argued that as leading economic and nuclear powers, both nations had an obligation to work together to halt proliferation and to ensure strong, balanced growth.
However the two sides have been at loggerheads over a broad range of issues for months, especially economic, and Obama's reinvigoration of US engagement in China's backyard in Asia may also strain ties.
Ahead of the meeting, US President Barack Obama urged leaders to work together for global economic recovery.
He also defended the US's policy of pumping $600bn into the economy.
"In a prudent, stable way, we want to make sure that we are boosting growth rates at home as well as abroad," Mr Obama said of the policy announced last week designed to kick-start the US economy's fragile recovery.
The US, striving to recover from its worst economic crisis in decades, locked horns anew with exporting giants China and Germany over a plan to rebalance skewed trade between deficit and surplus countries.
President Barack Obama, grafting to salvage a deal at the G20 after suffering an economy-linked drubbing in US elections last week, said his administration wanted to boost growth via "prudent" economic policies.
"It is difficult to do that if we start seeing the huge imbalances redevelop that helped to contribute to the crisis that we just went through," he told a news conference with the summit's host, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak.
But controversy is rife in the G20 after the Federal Reserve instituted a 600-billion-dollar attempt to reflate the US economy, in a radical monetary step that foreign critics say will trigger tit-for-tat currency devaluations.
Chinese officials sought to throw the onus back on the United States by arguing that Beijing has an "unswerving" commitment to reform its currency regime, but needs stability in the world economy to do it.
"If you're sick yourself, don't ask others to take medicine," commerce ministry spokesman Yu Jianhua said, demanding the debt-ridden US fix its own house first.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, however, conceded that the G20 was not in a "heroic phase" after its determined response to the 2008 financial crisis, and that it needed to do "a lot more work" on fixing economic imbalances.