Americans spend too much money on consumer goodies and save too little for the future. Chinese consumers save a lot for retirement but don't spend enough along the way.

There is a growing international consensus that something needs to be done about these global economic imbalances. Despite the recession, the U.S. continues to run a trade deficit, and Asian nations such as China have a hefty trade surplus.

President Obama spoke out about the problem over the weekend. “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 told CNN.

Some economists believe the growing trade and financial imbalances—what’s known as the current account—were a contributing factor to the worldwide recession that began in the U.S. and then spread globally.

“If you have a chronic account surplus or a chronic account deficit, you need to adjust your policies so that your savings and investment rates are in better balance,” says Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. “We failed to do that in the first half of the decade, when our savings rate was 6 percent below our investment rate. The Chinese failed to do that and had the opposite problem.”

How did imbalances help cause the recession? Many analysts believe that cheap credit helped fuel the subprime crisis in real estate. Paul Blustein, a trade expert at the Brookings Institution, notes that China was recycling its huge dollar surplus into American securities—estimated at $1.5 trillion by some experts—keeping U.S. interest rates low despite efforts by the Federal Reserve to cool the economy. “It helped keep mortgage rates low and keep capital cheap,” Blustein said. The U.S. was able to keep rates low because it always had a ready buyer—China—at auctions for government securities.

The global trade imbalance is going to be a major topic on Thursday at a summit meeting of leaders from the G-20 countries hosted by Obama in Pittsburgh. “We hope to reach agreement on a framework for balanced growth, for agreeing on how to address the imbalances that led to the crisis, and on some process for holding each other accountable,” Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economics, told a press briefing last week.

While the causes of the recession are now well known, the solution is not so simple. One of the possible solutions being sounded out in advance of the G-20 meeting was to give the International Monetary Fund the role of monitoring the world economy for imbalances and then offering advice to fix the problem, though the IMF’s decisions would not be binding.

“We need to have rebalancing of growth and increase in consumption in the emerging markets to have enough growth in the short term,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF told the Financial Times. “We also need to define what the long-term growth model will be.”