"In the next few months Colombia, Mexico and Poland are not going to need to renew their flexible credit lines, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) chief economist said on Monday. Olivier Blanchard told a conference in Buenos Aires that capital markets are again functioning, lessening the need for the credit lines.... The Washington-based lender created earlier this year the flexible credit line, or FCL....Blanchard said the lines worked as well as they could in the crisis and now is the time to analyze how they could work better in a future crisis...." [Reuters/Factiva]

In related news, Dow Jones writes that "...the massive accumulation of foreign exchange reserves prior to the recent global financial crisis hasn't had much of an influence on sustaining economic growth, Blanchard said Monday. Nor, contrary to many expectations, has spending reserves helped gross domestic product, Blanchard told a conference at the Argentine Central Bank.... The official said that open economies have done worse during the crisis; and that the size of a country's current account deficit was a very strong predictor of the impact of the crisis...." [Dow Jones/Factiva]

Plus News Pakistan adds that "...the global recovery from recession underway requires a delicate rebalancing of economies - notably between the US and Asia - to sustain it, the chief IMF economist said Tuesday.... Blanchard said two rebalancing acts will have to come into play to sustain the global recovery: a switch from public to private spending and the rebalancing of international trade flows...." [Plus News Pakistan/Factiva]