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Europe has to get its act together. What is happening in Europe is having an impact on developing countries

TOKYO — The IMF on Thursday backed giving debt-burdened Greece and Spain more time to reduce their budget deficits, cautioning that cutting too far, too fast would do more harm than good.

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But Germany pushed back and said back-tracking on debt-reduction goals would only hurt confidence, a stance that suggested some disagreement between the International Monetary Fund and Europe’s largest creditor country.

“The IMF has time and again said that high public debt poses a problem,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters. “So when there is a certain medium-term goal, it doesn’t build confidence when one starts by going in a different direction.”

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“When you want to climb a big mountain and you start climbing down then the mountain will get even higher.”

The IMF released new research this week showing that fiscal consolidation has a much sharper negative effect on growth than previously thought. Since the global financial crisis, these so-called fiscal multipliers have been as much as three times larger than they were before 2009, the IMF research shows.