The emergency tool kit that helped to pull the global economy out of the Great Financial Crisis might not work a second time, the world’s lender of last resort has warned.

David Lipton, deputy director of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, delivered a stark warning about the depleted power of central banks and governments to combat another sharp economic shock.

“The bottom line is this: the tools used to confront the Global Financial Crisis may not be available or may not be as potent next time,” he said in a speech on the future of the eurozone in Portugal on Monday.

This was a pressing concern because the world should “anticipate that a downturn awaits us somewhere over the horizon',' Mr Lipton said. Particularly after many people had been “surprised by the size and pace of the recent deceleration” in Europe.

During the crisis in 2008 the world’s largest central banks developed money-printing programmes known as quantitative easing. These efforts effectively pumped trillions’ worth of cash into economies to try and offset the impact of a credit crunch and the collapse of major banks.

However, these efforts were so vast, and the recovery of economies so weak in the decade since the crisis, that central banks' balance sheets have swollen to a level that leaves little room left for manoeuvre. Following various bailouts and slow recoveries many governments still have large debt piles, reducing the fiscal firepower available to counteract recessions.