U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday he would push world leaders this week for a reshaping of the global economy in response to the deepest financial crisis in decades.

In Europe, officials kept up pressure for a deal to curb bankers’ pay and bonuses at a two-day summit of leaders from the Group of 20 countries which begins on Thursday.

The summit will be held in the former steelmaking center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, marking the third time in less than a year that leaders of countries accounting for about 85 percent of the world economy will have met to coordinate their responses to the crisis. 

Obama said the U.S. economy was recovering, even if unemployment remained high, and now was the time to rebalance the global economy after decades of U.S. over-consumption.

“We can’t go back to the era where the Chinese or the Germans or other countries just are selling everything to us, we’re taking out a bunch of credit card debt or home equity loans, but we’re not selling anything to them,” Obama said in an interview with CNN television. 

For years before the financial crisis erupted in 2007, economists had warned of the dangers of imbalances in the global economy — namely huge trade surpluses and currency reserves built up by exporters like China, and similarly big deficits in the United States and other economies. 

With U.S. consumers now holding back on spending after house prices plunged and as unemployment climbs, Washington wants other countries to become engines of growth.

“That’s part of what the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh is going to be about, making sure that there’s a more balanced economy,” Obama told CNN.

China has long been the target of calls from the West to get its massive population to spend more. It may be reluctant to offer a significant change in economic policy when Chinese President Hu Jintao meets Obama this week. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. proposal to the rest of the G20 group foresaw a new global economic framework under which the United States would save more and cut its budget deficit, China would rely less on exports and Europe would make structural changes, possibly in areas such as labor law, to make itself more attractive to investment.

China was reluctant about the plan but Washington was bringing Beijing along by supporting its call for more say for developing countries at the International Monetary Fund, the newspaper said on its website.

G20 countries have not decided how detailed to make their pledges to change their economies and there would be no specific sanctions for those falling short, the report said. 

Some economists have worried that a trade dispute over new U.S. import duties on Chinese tires could make it hard for leaders to renew their pledges to avoid protectionism, let alone discuss a major rethink of the world economy. 

Nonetheless, calls for a new equilibrium are growing. 

“We need to have rebalancing of growth and increase in consumption in the emerging markets to have enough growth in the short term,” International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the Financial Times.