The head of the International Monetary Fund said on Saturday that if countries are successful in cleansing their financial systems, the fiscal stimulus already implemented for 2009 “may be enough”.

Dominique Strauss Kahn, the Fund’s managing director, said that all the IMF’s main members agreed on the need for fiscal stimulus in 2009 and had stopped worrying about small differences in the degree of stimulus. He called the transatlantic arguments that raged earlier this year “a little bit childish”.