By PAUL WISEMAN
AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON – The world’s most important economies are going home to look after themselves. They left their summit without any meaningful agreement, finding it ever harder to cooperate and more likely to erect trade barriers to protect their own interests.
The Group of 20 meeting of leading rich and developing nations ended Friday in South Korea with no solutions to longstanding tensions over trade and currency, and with the cooperation of the 2008 financial crisis now a distant memory.
The U.S. couldn’t persuade other countries to pressure China to stop manipulating its currency or limit their own trade surpluses and deficits. The Americans faced charges of doing some currency manipulation of their own by pumping $600 billion into their economy.