IMF Planning to Raise Growth Forecasts: Lagarde

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is planning to raise its global growth forecasts, amid increased optimism about the world’s economic future.

The IMF will revise its forecast for how quickly the world’s economy will expand in about three weeks, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the powerful international fund, told reporters.

“We will be revising upwards the global forecast of the economic growth,” she told a press conference in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, where she was visiting, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Late last year, the fund revised its global growth forecasts down slightly, to a prediction of 2.9 percent growth in 2013 and 3.6 percent in 2014. It argued that economies around the world were still in “low gear” following the continued fallout from the credit crisis, and continuing problems in some of the emerging markets.

Since then, more confidence about the economy around the world has returned after the U.S. Federal Reserve started gradually reducing its asset-purchasing program – a process which had been much-feared but has so far been absorbed by markets.