President Barack Obama stepped up the pace of Washington’s stimulus spending on Monday with plans to create or save 600,000 jobs over the next hundred days – four times the rate achieved in the $787bn package’s first 100 days.

The announcement, which followed last week’s news that 345,000 US jobs had been lost in May, a significant deceleration from earlier months, coincided with a forecast on Monday that the major industrialised economies, including the US, could soon emerge from recession.