The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said on Thursday that she wants a “constructive dialogue” with Argentina, while at the same time warned that she is not willing to make any “concessions” in terms of the quality of official data the IMF receives from member countries.
The International Monetary Fund re-activated this week a 571 billion dollars resource pool to ensure it has funds to help cover Europe's worsening sovereign-debt crisis. The IMF extended activation of its so-called New Arrangements to Borrow for a six-month period from October.
The International Monetary Fund will use estimates from the private sector and provincial governments to measure economic growth and inflation in Argentina, underscoring the IMF distrust of official data.
The global economic recovery is slowing, with world growth projected at 4% in both 2011 and 2012, down from over 5% in 2010, the IMF said in its latest forecast. And even this lowered projection counts on a lot going well.
The IMF cut its growth forecast for the 17-nation Euro zone by nearly half a percentage point to 1.6% in 2011 and even weaker conditions are seen for next year with growth of just 1.1%. Currently the single currency region is scarcely growing at a 0.25% annual rate.
The IMF forecasts Uruguay’s economy will expand 6% in 2011 and 4.2% the following year. Estimates are in line with targets made public by Uruguay’s central bank.
The head of the International Monetary Fund today urged advanced countries to take bold, coordinated action to break a vicious cycle of weak growth and high debt that threatens the global economy and has been worsened by dysfunctional politics.
The International Monetary Fund hopes investments in European bonds by the fast-growing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies are not limited to less risky government bonds such as German or British bonds, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said in an Italian daily on Wednesday.
The Italian parliament gave final approval on Wednesday to a much-altered austerity plan aimed at stemming a debt crisis engulfing the euro zone's third largest economy.
Western and Middle Eastern governments pledged to help Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan make the transition to democracy, mobilizing 38 billion dollars of financing, mostly through international lending organizations.