Federal Reserve Chairman Ben.S.Bernanke and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet who united to fight the worst global recession in six decades, may be diverging over the outlook for their economies.

The Bernanke-led Fed, while saying U.S. growth would be slower than anticipated, announced on Aug. 10 it will buy Treasuries to set a $2.05 trillion floor on its balance sheet and keep interest rates from rising. Trichet said Aug. 5 that the euro-area economy was surpassing forecasts, which may pave the way for the ECB to look at phasing out its emergency lending measures.

Any transatlantic divide may be on display when the two central bankers address the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Their attitudes contrast with the second quarter, when the European fiscal crisis forced Trichet to buy government bonds for the first time and Bernanke discussed how and when to cut the Fed’s balance sheet.

Now the ECB is “actually looking to the timing of an exit policy, whereas the Fed has obviously put that on the back burner,” Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America Corp. and a Jackson Hole. “The U.S. economy right now is in a soft patch and feels fragile, while in the aggregate the European economies have seemingly weathered the storm much better than people expected.”

Trichet’s optimism and Bernanke’s caution could strengthen the euro against the dollar, said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London. The dollar slid 0.5 percent yesterday in New York to $1.2719 per euro.

U.S. economic growth slowed more sharply than initially thought in the second quarter, held back by the largest increase in imports in 26 years, a government report showed on Friday.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 1.6% annual rate, the Commerce Department said, instead of the 2.4% pace it had estimated last month.

However, the reading was a touch better than market expectations. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast GDP, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, revised down to a 1.4% growth rate.

The economy grew at a 3.7% pace in the first three months of the year.

The slackening economic recovery is a major political challenge for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party two months away from crucial mid-term elections that could shift the balance of power in Congress in favour of Republicans.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found Obama’s approval rating at 45% overtaken for the first time by a 52% disapproval rating.

The revised GDP data will likely fuel analysts’ concern that slowing growth is putting the economy at growing risk of slipping back into recession. Federal Reserve policymakers were meeting on Friday at their annual retreat in Wyoming to ponder the economy’s direction and hear from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

“There is no doubt we are losing momentum in the economic recovery,” said Robert Dye, senior economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. “But if we define recession as two or more consecutive declining quarters of GDP, I think we are not going to go there.

“We are going to see a pattern where we may have declining GDP in one quarter followed by smaller gains in the next quarter, bouncing along the bottom as it were,” Dye said.

The recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression had been largely fueled by a US$862 billion government stimulus package and businesses rebuilding inventories from record low levels.

Growth in the last quarter was stifled by a 32.4% surge in imports, the largest since the first quarter of 1984, dwarfing a 9.1% rise in exports. That created a trade deficit, which sliced off 3.37% percentage points from GDP, the largest subtraction since the fourth quarter of 1947.

A smaller contribution from business inventories than initially estimated also restrained output. Business inventories increased only US$63.2 billion, rather than US$75.7 billion, adding a slim 0.63 percentage points to GDP.

Inventories, which had been a major driver of the recovery that started in the second half of 2009, increased US$44.1 billion in the first three months of the year.

Excluding inventories, the economy expanded at a 1.0% rate, instead of the 1.3% pace reported last month.

There were some bright spots in the report, with growth in consumer spending revised up to a 2.0% rates from 1.6%. Consumer spending grew at a 1.9% rate in the first quarter.

Stubbornly high unemployment has dampened consumer spending, which normally accounts for 70% of U.S. economic activity. Spending added 1.38%age points to GDP last quarter.

Although businesses have been reluctant to hire new workers, they have been splurging on equipment and software, which also contributed to the surge in imports. Business investment was revised up to a 17.6% rate, the largest increase since the first quarter of 2006, from the previously estimated 17% pace.

Investment in equipment and software was the strongest since the fourth quarter of 1983. Spending on structures was revised to show a far smaller increase than previously estimated but still posted the first rise in spending on structures since the second quarter of 2008.

Growth in new home construction was revised down slightly to 27.2% from 27.9%. The sector, which was a drag on growth in the first quarter, was lifted by a spurt in building activity spurred by a popular home-buyer tax credit that has since expired. The rate of increase was still the biggest since the third quarter of 1983.

Residential investment had contracted at a 12.3% rate in the first quarter. The GDP also showed corporate profits rose 2.9% in the second quarter after increasing 5.8% in the first three months of the year.