Georgieva said she had to work “redoubled efforts” to be on an equal footing with her male colleagues.
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The IMF has yet to see enough banks withdrawing their loans that it would cause the Fed to change the course of its rate hike cycle.
“We haven’t seen a significant slowdown in lending yet. There’s been some, but not on a scale,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told CNBC’s Karen Tso in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on Saturday. would cause the Fed to exit.”
Lenders are worried about what lies ahead, the Fed warned in a May report on banks, as problems at midsize U.S. financial institutions lead banks to tighten lending standards to households and businesses.
The Fed’s lending officials added that they expect the problems to persist next year amid downgraded growth forecasts and concerns about deposit outflows and reduced risk tolerance.
Georgieva told CNBC: “How can I emphasize that we are all in a very uncertain environment. So pay attention to trends and be agile, adjust — Should the trend change? “
The IMF’s comments on the slowdown in global lending, after the IMF’s chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told CNBC in April that banks are now in a “more precarious situation,” will weigh heavily on the international body’s forecast for world growth. The forecast poses a risk of 2.8% this year.
Most of the world’s major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, have aggressively tightened monetary policy to curb soaring inflation. Meanwhile, global debt has ballooned to a near-record high of $305 trillion, according to the Institute of International Finance. The IIF said in its May report that high debt levels and interest rates have raised further concerns about leverage in the financial system.
‘more’
With the IMF yet to see a sharp slowdown in lending that would prompt the Fed to change its course, Georgieva said, coupled with A resilient U.S. jobs report on Friday pointed to the possibility of further rate hikes.
“The pressure from rising incomes and still very, very low unemployment means the Fed is going to have to hang on, and maybe in our view, they might need to do more,” she said.
She expects the U.S. unemployment rate to exceed 4% and as high as 4.5%, with the Fed raising rates further after unemployment rose to 3.7% in May, the highest level since October 2022.
Regarding the U.S. government’s passage of a debt ceiling bill signed by President Joe Biden over the weekend, she said: “In the context of the agreement, the agreement that has been reached is, broadly speaking, a good outcome.”
“The problem is that, in our view, the back and forth debate around the debt ceiling is not very helpful. There is room for rethinking how to do it,” she added.
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Elliot Smith contributed to this report