The United States has an interest in improving regulation of the financial system to restore confidence and encourage the capital imports on which it depends, Germany`s finance minister said Friday.

The US should boost confidence in its system `to guarantee that capital inflows continue` to finance the state and consumers who depend on borrowing, Peer Steinbrueck told reporters on the sidelines of a summit of leaders here.

Improved regulation is one of the themes of the summit, which has brought together leaders from industrialized and emerging countries representing 85 percent of the world economy.

Steinbrueck said the summit would begin the process of reforming areas of the financial system that had been shown to be vulnerable, with a date of March 31 agreed as a deadline for work.

He also stressed the historic nature of the summit to which Brazil, Russia, India and China have been invited.

In the past, rich countries had favored smaller meetings of the Group of Seven industrialized nations rather than this weekend`s expanded Group of Twenty gathering, he underlined.

The emerging countries `are more powerful and more confident than they have ever been,` he said.

`These countries are telling us `the financial crisis, it`s you (rich countries) that started it`,` he said, explaining that emerging countries wanted their wealthy counterparts to take responsibility.

`And that means in the end `money`,` he said.