IMF chief says govt bailouts unlikely in future financial crises

AFP - International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Friday bailout-weary governments are unlikely to rescue banks if another financial crisis develops.
   
The former French finance minister said he could not imagine lawmakers in developed countries agreeing to any fresh bank rescues.
   
"I'm convinced that most parliaments, the Congress here in the United States, the National Assembly in France, Westminster in the UK, others, will be very reluctant, to say the least, to give money again to the financial sector," the IMF chief said at a news conference in Washington organized by the French American Chamber of Commerce.
   
"Especially when they see how the financial sector behaves just in the aftermath of the crisis," he added, referring to the continued payment of lavish bonuses blamed for encouraging excessive risk taking that caused the global financial crisis.
   
Strauss-Kahn stressed the need for new means to address the problems that had spun the global economy into its worst downturn in decades.
   
"We have 12 months or 24 months to be able to set up something which would be... safer and which would be more likely to resist, avoid the kind of problem we just had," he said.
   
The IMF estimates that the Group of 20 major developed and emerging economies spent more than 1.9 trillion dollars to support their financial systems between 2008 and August 2009 amid the global crisis.