President Barack Obama said a deeper relationship between the US and China is critical to the economic prosperity of both countries and essential to confronting global issues such as climate change.

The US president, addressing students at a forum in Shanghai, also brought up the issue of human rights, saying political and religious freedoms should be “universal” and available to all people and groups “whether they are in the United States, China or any other nation.”

Financial officials in Japan and China, Asia’s two largest economies, warned the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy risks spurring speculative capital that may inflate asset prices and derail the global economic recovery.

Emerging economies “might overheat and experience financial turmoil,” Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said in Tokyo. Low rates and the dollar’s depreciation present “new, real and insurmountable risks to the recovery of the global economy,” Liu Mingkang, China’s top banking regulator, said.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has succeeded in returning the US economy to growth after the longest contraction in more than six decades. So far Wall Street, not Main Street, has been the primary beneficiary.

Bernanke has helped spark a 62-percent rally in the stock market since March 9 by pledging to keep borrowing costs “exceptionally low” for “an extended period.” His efforts haven’t stopped unemployment from reaching a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October.