SmartHomeOwners

OTTAWA:  The Bank of Montreal says the global economy is too fragile for governments to lock into deficit-tightening agendas.

The chartered bank says in a new report that most industrialized nations should continue pumping money to support the recovery.

The bank says the U.S. is definitely in that camp, and even Canada's federal government should not be so adamant about a hard deadline for ending its stimulus programs.

The advice comes after a rough week for the global economy and markets that has again raised concerns of a stall to the recovery, or even a double-dip recession.

Deputy chief economist Douglas Porter says the problem with stimulus so far is not that it hasn't worked, but that it hasn't been really tried.

That's especially true in the United States, he says, where whatever money Washington has devoted to pumping up the economy has been undercut by fiscal belt-tightening at the state level.

In Canada, he says the federal government's stimulus plan has added only about one per cent to gross domestic output from what would normally have been the case.