G20 finance ministers meet as America First casts pall

Finance ministers from the world's biggest economies sat down for tense talks in Germany today, formally engaging in a battle of wills over the future of the global free-trade system which ranges a newly forthright US against historic allies.

President Donald Trump has already torn up a trans-Pacific free trade pact, threatened punitive tariffs against multinationals with factories outside the United States and attacked "currency manipulation" by export giant China.

And his stated aim of keeping jobs at home by making it costly for American companies to outsource is dominating talks at the G20 gathering of finance ministers and central bankers in the western German spa town of Baden-Baden.

Trump's emissary, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is being scrutinised by Washington's key trading partners for clues on whether the world's biggest economy fully intends to abandon its long-standing support of open markets and free trade.

"We want a positive declaration in favour of free trade," the European Union's economy commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, told AFP on the sidelines of the meeting, "to note that that's the framework the globe's economic life must be organised within."

The US was at odds with other delegations over whether to include such language in the text of a final communique signed by all participants, a source close to the talks told AFP today.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived at the White House for her first visit with Trump around the same time the ministers were sitting down in Germany, amid expectations she will make a strong push for open markets.