Yet the money might not cover the job and those lofty plans might never get approved.
Failure would carry a heavy political price because the Group of 20 countries - composed of industrialized and developing countries - have made the lending agency the linchpin in their efforts to combat the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Finance ministers from those nations met on Friday to hammer out details of the $1.1 trillion plan that President Barack Obama and his G-20 counterparts announced at their recent summit in London.
Some parts are proving elusive.
Major developing nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China, for example - balked at providing their contributions to a $500 billion IMF emergency loan program under the original proposal outlined by the United States and Europe.
An approach pushed by China gained momentum and the IMF decided Saturday to sell bonds that developing nations would buy, rather than go the traditional loan route.
Even with a deal, however, it’s not clear that the IMF’s pool will have enough to jump-start the economy.
The IMF estimates that before the downturn bottoms out, the agency could provide around $187 billion to recession-battered nations. That would dwarf the $86 billion during the 1997-98 Asian crisis, which leveled countries from Thailand to Russia and Argentina.
The projected lending spree is quite a change from a year ago, when the IMF appeared headed to irrelevance. The long global boom meant countries were coming much less often, hat in hand, seeking assistance.
The IMF was scrambling to pay its bills and trim down. Its major source of income, loan repayments, had fallen sharply.
Today the agency is expanding again, approving loans to a string of countries. It’s not clear whether the boost in resources will be enough.
The key is whether the broken banking systems in the United States and elsewhere can be repaired quickly enough so normal lending can resume to consumers and businesses. This lending is needed to spur an economic rebound in industrial countries, which leads to increased demand for developing nations’ exports.
The agency also faces questions about how it should change to better cope with the problems of a global economy vastly different from what existed when the institution was created in the 1940s.
Some suggest ideas that would transform the agency into a kind of U.N. Security Council for economic matters, with the power to blow the whistle when economic practices in any country threaten the global economy.
But the IMF has trouble exercising the limited monitoring powers it now has. Rich and poor nations alike bristle at even the mild suggestions contained in the IMF’s annual performance reviews.
Major developing countries such as China, Brazil and India are pushing to obtain greater voting powers at the IMF in line with their growing roles in the world economy. This dispute is threatening to derail the efforts to boost IMF resources.
The battle over tiny changes in voting shares is evidence of the many hurdles to overcome before the IMF can increase its powers as the globe’s economic traffic cop.
