Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin Photo: mfa.gov.cn

China urges the US to earnestly adopt responsible fiscal and monetary policies, strengthen macroeconomic policy coordination with other economies, jointly safeguard international economic and financial stability and promote the world's economic recovery, China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

"As the world's largest economy and the issuer of a major international currency, the US fiscal position and its policy choices have important spillover effects on the world economy, and it should adopt responsible fiscal and monetary policies," Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a regular press conference.

For a long time, the US has abused its dollar hegemony, borrowed recklessly, shifted its financial crisis to the world, adopted unlimited quantitative easing, and exported inflation to the world, which aggravated the debt problems of some emerging markets and developing countries, severely hit their economies, and seriously held back the global economic recovery, said Wang.

These behaviors again manifested what John Connolly, then secretary of the US Treasury, said in 1971 - "The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem." 

Wang's remarks came in response to the Global Debt Monitor released by the Institute of International Finance on May 17, which said that global debt stock grew by $8.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2023 to a near record $305 trillion.

Of the total, the US has the largest national debt in the world, reaching $31.4 trillion.

Global debt is now $45 trillion higher than the pre-pandemic level and is expected to increase rapidly. The global debt to GDP ratio has stabilized at about 335 percent of GDP. The increase was sharper in mature markets, driven by Japan, the US, France and the UK, read the report.