Now is not the time to relax efforts to support the world economy, Tim Geithner said yesterday as he called on international leaders to lay a new path for global growth less reliant on the US consumer.

Speaking ahead of this weekend's meeting of global finance ministers in Washington, the US Treasury secretary said “one of the big mistakes countries make in crises is that they step on the brakes too early or ease up on the accelerator too early at the first signs of progress”.

He warned that this crisis was “not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession” in which economies “ultimately adjust and stabilise”. Rather, it was “an abrupt correction of financial excesses” that had overwhelmed the self-correcting mechanisms of markets” and could only be ended by “extraordinary policy responses”.