In This Story:

• Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary to attend
• China jittery over yuan's stability
• Clinton cautious of Hashimoto's reform pledge
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TOKYO (CNN) -- Finance officials from around the world began key closed-door talks Saturday to discuss Asia's economic crisis and to initiate strategies to strengthen the battered regional currencies.

The meeting in Tokyo is one of the broadest since Asia's financial crisis began almost one year ago and comes just days after dramatic intervention by the United States and Japan to stop the yen's recent freefall against the dollar.

But before the meetings began, participants were not optimistic about the talks' potential outcome. Japanese Finance Minister Hikaru Matsunaga said the meeting of senior officials from the G7 leading industrial nations, 11 Asian nations and global organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank would not produce specific policy action.

"No, it's not that. This is an exchange of views," Matsunaga said after making an opening address to the gathering in a hotel in central Tokyo.

Japan's top financial diplomat and chair of the meeting, Eisuke Sakakibara, added: "I want the meeting to confirm a common understanding and a common response among the United States, Europe and Asia toward the crises in Japan and Asia."

The comments echoed those on Friday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who said that the high-level gathering was unlikely to produce a new bold action plan.

"We have said from the very beginning there will not be policy actions," he said.

Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who arrived in Tokyo earlier in the week for talks on Japan's economic woes and the weakness of the yen, will also attend the meeting. Summers, during a flurry of crisis talks with top Japanese officials on Friday, hammered home the U.S. message that Tokyo must quickly forge policies to revive its sick economy and cure its financial system's bad loan woes.

Washington and Tokyo stunned markets on Wednesday when they moved jointly to intervene to bolster the battered yen.

The joint intervention -- the first yen rescue mission in more than six years -- was prompted by fears that the Japanese currency's slide would rob Asia of its chance to recover and trigger another round of tit-for-tat currency devaluations.

Some experts, however, worry that no amount of intervention will restore long-term confidence in the yen unless Japan takes decisive action to clean up its troubled banking system .

China, which U.S. President Bill Clinton will visit along with Rubin and other top U.S. officials beginning Wednesday, had hinted it might not be able to hold the fort on its yuan currency -- thus far a bulwark in the troubled region.

Easing concerns over the health of Japan's banks and resolving the bad loan problem is key to reviving Japan's economy, which slipped into a recession earlier this year.

A government-ruling party panel will work on the details of measures to encourage banks to liquidate bad loans faster and to stabilize the financial system at a meeting on Tuesday.

"In that sense, today may be a bit early," Matsunaga said.

Summers Friday received assurances from members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party that Japan will to take up debts at failed banks.

Japan faces a key election for parliament's Upper House on July 12, raising fears that the campaign would spell a policy vacuum on economic policies.

Clinton said in Washington on Friday that Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto had promised to implement reform quickly. But Clinton added he was unsure whether anything could be accomplished before the election date.

Japan's banks face $563 billion in bad debts and many are expected to collapse as the Japanese government institutes financial deregulation.