I.M.F. Seeks More Money for Struggling Economies

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 3, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — The managing director of the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the global recovery was growing stronger but remained fragile, and called on the international community to give the organization more firepower to help stabilize tottering economies. 

“We certainly need more resources,” the director, Christine Lagarde, told the annual meeting of The Associated Press. Ms. Lagarde said the I.M.F. would address the question of how much more was needed at its spring meeting in two weeks. 

The I.M.F. currently has about $400 billion in resources that it can use to provide loans to countries in trouble. Ms. Lagarde has talked about expanding that to close to $1 trillion. The 17 countries in the European Union that use the euro have already promised to provide $200 billion (150 billion euros) of that amount. 

Ms. Lagarde said that the global economy was making some advances in digging itself out of the worst downturn in decades, but that the recovery remained particularly frail in Europe. She suggested cutting government spending too quickly in developed countries like the United States and larger European nations could make things worse, not better. 

Policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic need “breathing space to finish the job,” she said. Ms. Lagarde also said that Europe’s faltering would quickly spread and that the United States recovery, slowly gaining strength, “might well be in jeopardy.” 

“America has a large stake” in how Europe and the rest of the world fares, Ms. Lagarde said. 

She said it was important to continue and expand emergency programs in the euro zone to help heavily indebted countries there. 

Ms. Lagarde’s remarks came after the European Union raised its emergency bailout funds on Friday for heavily indebted countries to $1.1 trillion (800 billion euros). That was short of the $1.3 trillion (1 trillion euros) that Ms. Lagarde and other international leaders have said is needed to calm financial markets. 
Fuente: The New York Times