By Sumeet Desai
LONDON, March 17 (Reuters) - The world's top economic powers urgently need to commit to more stimulus and fix their banking systems in order to combat the worst downturn in a generation, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said on Tuesday.
Further out, King said, policymakers will need additional powers to rein in financial sector excesses -- perhaps some thing like countercyclical capital requirements -- as using interest rates could cause unnecessary job losses.
"But the immediate need is to deal with the extraordinarily steep and simultaneous downturn in so many economies around the world, and to stabilise the banking system in those countries where it has failed," he said, according to the speech text.
"That should be the main priority at the forthcoming G20 summit."
Leaders from the G20 club of nations which includes the rich world like the United States and Germany as well as developing countries like India and China will meet in London on April 2 for a crisis summit on the world economy.
King attended a preparatory meeting of finance ministers and central bankers at the weekend where few concrete pledges were made to save the world economy though the governor insisted that he had been encouraged by an "unusual sense of determination".
"A joint commitment to a macroeconomic stimulus -- the division between monetary and fiscal measures is a matter for individual countries to determine -- is required," he said.
"The measures need to add up to a collective determination to support an adequate level of money spending, and will need to include actions to help poorer countries borrow either from the International Monetary Fund or on world capital markets."
EXIT STRATEGY
At the same time, King said, countries also need to sort out their financial systems even though it may take many months to figure out what banks' balance sheets were really like."
"They have to subscribe sufficient equity capital -- plain ordinary equity -- in order to underpin the capital position of banks in the event of future losses," he said.
"It follows that governments must be prepared to hold whatever proportion of equity capital turns out to be necessary."
But at some point, policymakers will have to unwind the huge amount of stimulus they have put into their economies.
"There needs to be a clear exit route by which the extraordinary level of official financial support will be unwound as conditions return to normal," he said.
"At some point central banks' balance sheets will have to contract."
King also talked about how monetary policy could not be relied on to check the financial sector and so more tools might be needed.
For example, banks might have to raise more capital in the good times in the event of bad times ahead.