The deputy head of the International Monetary Fund said on Jan. 27, 2001, the IMF may cut its 2001 world growth forecast to around 3.5 percent from 4.2 percent and warned Japan had little scope to spur growth soon. Stanley Fischer, first deputy managing director of the IMF, said the world was still far from the recession seen in the early 1980s and 1990s and both the U.S. and Europe had room to cut interest rates in response to the slowdown.

He said the IMF was revising its forecast "but it is