Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the Group of 20 nations has been “very successful” in helping to end the global recession and cautioned that it’s too early to remove policies aimed at boosting growth. “You’re seeing the first signs of positive growth now in this country and countries around the world,” Geithner told reporters in Washington yesterday. “We’ve come a very long way but I think we have to be realistic, we’ve got a long way to go still.” Geithner is scheduled to depart today for two days of meetings in London with finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations. He sent a letter yesterday to his counterparts seeking agreement on capital standards for global financial institutions, a European government official said on condition of anonymity. The London meeting is to lay the groundwork for a summit later this month in Pittsburgh, where G-20 leaders will discuss measures to overhaul supervision of the financial system. Geithner said talks will include the start of a discussion on bank capital standards as well as a “framework” for how the world’s largest industrial and developing nations can cooperate to remove policies to stimulate growth. While it’s “too early” to implement exit strategies, it’s not too soon to talk about them, he said. International Accord The U.S. wants to discuss how to build a new “international capital accord” to rein in the amount of leverage that financial firms take on, Geithner told reporters yesterday. Such an arrangement would set standards for how much capital that financial firms would need to hold in reserve to cushion against potential losses. “We’re going to talk about a framework of design principles, and I think we’re going to start to talk about timetables for what we try to get the world to commit to do in that context,” he said. In the letter to his counterparts, Geithner called for the implementation of more stringent capital requirements for banks, according to the European official. Other measures the U.S. supports are a simple leverage ratio, countercyclical capital buffers and forward-looking provisioning against losses, according to the letter, the person said. Emerging Markets Cooperation is needed for any new standards to be effective, Geithner said in his briefing yesterday. He said emerging market nations, many of which already have “pretty conservative” bank supervision in place, will play a bigger role than they have in the past. “This is not something we can take a long time to do,” he said. “It took the world a very long time to reform the previous system, and that was a consequential and costly failure of cooperation, and we’re not going to repeat that mistake.” Geithner declined to comment on the recent elections in Japan and said he’s looking forward to working with the new members of the Japanese government. European finance ministers lined up this week behind proposals to limit bank bonuses as governments sought to forge a common stance on overhauling the financial system before the G- 20 summit. ‘Bonus Culture’ “The bonus culture must come to an end,” Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg, whose nation currently holds the rotating European Union presidency, told reporters yesterday as he arrived for a meeting of EU finance chiefs in Brussels. “The bankers are acting like it’s 1999.” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said in Brussels before the meeting that she has “firm proposals to put some order into the system of bonuses.” France will suggest curbing bonus pools as a percentage of a bank’s revenue, imposing a ceiling on payments or taxing them, a Finance Ministry official told reporters earlier this week. In yesterday’s briefing, Geithner said curtailing executive compensation is “a critical part of our broader reform agenda.” He said the U.S. has proposed “pretty comprehensive reforms” to give shareholders more control over pay policies and also give managers better incentives to act in the best long-term interests of their banks. “If you look at what’s happening across Europe, like in many of these areas, there’s a lot in common in terms of basic strategy,” Geithner said. He declined to comment on specific changes sought by his counterparts, saying he had not yet had detailed discussions on the proposals. Jobs Report Geithner, 48, will be in London the same day the U.S. Labor Department releases its report on the job market in August. Economists anticipate the report will show the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, from 9.4 percent a month earlier, according to a Bloomberg News survey. Recent economic figures have shown U.S. manufacturing expanded in August for the first time in 19 months, and gains in home sales and prices. It is “very important” to the U.S. to “reinforce the progress we are seeing,” Geithner said. To contact the reporter on this story: Rebecca Christie in Washington at Rchristie4@bloomberg.net

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