IMF says US needs to deal with debt ‘immediately’

“You cannot afford to have a world economy where these important decisions are postponed, because you’re really playing with fire,” said Jose Vinals, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, according to Reuters.

In the latest version of its World Economic Outlook, the IMF actually cut its economic growth expectations for the U.S. for 2011 and 2012. It now expects America’s economy to grow by 2.5 percent in 2011 and 2.7 percent in 2012. The prior version of the report, released in April, anticipated growth of 2.8 percent and 2.9 percent in each of those years.

The IMF acknowledged that some “negative surprises” dragged on economic growth in the first few months of the year, singling out the natural disasters in Japan that disrupted global supply chains.

But while the organization said it expects global activity to slow down in the second quarter of the year, it expects things to pick up in the latter half.