The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged governments and central banks to focus on how they will disengage from their global economic crisis interventions, in a report released Monday.

While it was too early for a comprehensive assessment of the long-term effectiveness of crisis interventions, experts from the fund found they had been effective in calming distressed financial markets, the IMF said in its Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR), October 2009.

As measured by their short-term goal of calming markets, announcements of liquidity support were most effective during the early phases of the crisis, while bank recapitalization and asset purchases by the authorities were most effective in later stages.

The IMF's initial conclusions on the long-term effectiveness of the measures were that the market prices of some financial instruments had started to stabilize and that debt issuance was picking up in response to the public sector's unprecedented crisis measures.

Governments globally and central banks implemented massive intervention measures after the onset of the financial crisis, especially since the collapse of Wall Street investment banking giant Lehman Brothers last September. When and how the public sector should disengage from these measures has become a key concern since signs of economic recovery have begun to appear recently.

The IMF suggests an exit strategy for the crisis interventions be considered before the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) gathers later this week in Pittsburgh for a third summit to tackle the financial crisis and global recession.

The IMF said that, since economic and financial conditions differed between countries, there was not a common template for when and in what order the public sector should unwind the facilities put in place during the crisis.

However, the fund said, some general principles did apply.

In general, disengagement in the financial system should be guided by the return of lasting confidence in the health of financial institutions and markets.

First, the strategy for the timing and the manner of unwinding crisis measures should include managing market expectations and having a clear communication on both when to start and on how to execute the unwinding strategies.

Second, it was important to plan on averting arbitrage opportunities across sectors and across national borders. For example, it was preferable, where possible, for countries to coordinate the unwinding of government guarantees on bank debt issuance.

Third, for government financial sector measures, priority should be given to exiting from support programs that had a significant distortionary impact on financial markets and involved large contingent liabilities for the government. Still, the timing and modalities of these decisions would need to be balanced against the condition of financial markets and, specifically, how illiquid or fragile they might still be.

(Xinhua News Agency September 22, 2009)