Sharp swings in global financial markets in the past few days are not worrying since economic growth is strong but reforms are still needed to avert future crises, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund said on Sunday. The latest volatility in global financial markets represents “necessary corrections”, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said in Dubai yesterday, in the wake of a Wall Street plunge. “The market trepidations that we have seen in the last few days are not worrying me. “Those market movements were clearly, in our view, necessary market corrections,” she told an audience at Dubais World Government Forum. “I‘m reasonably optimistic because of the landscape we have at the moment. But we cannot sit back and wait for growth to continue as normal,” she said in her first public comments on market movements since the latest round of turmoil at the end of last week. “I‘m ringing not the alarm signal, but the strong encouragement and warning signal.” Wall Street stocks ended a bruising week on a benign note courtesy of a late-session surge on Friday, while equity markets in Europe and Asia fell sharply in volatile trading. “I would not focus on what has happened in the last few days. I would focus on the imperatives of change going forward and the need to fix the roof,” Lagarde said. Speaking at the one-day Arab Fiscal Forum in Dubai, Lagarde welcomed “promising” reforms adopted by some Arab states, but insisted much more was needed to overcome daunting economic and social problems. Global stock markets were hit by wild fluctuations, with the U.S. benchmark S&P 500 .SPX tumbling 5.2 percent last week, its biggest weekly percentage drop since January 2016. The volatility was fuelled by investor worries about rising interest rates and potential inflation. Lagarde repeated an IMF forecast, originally issued last month, that the global economy would growth 3.9 percent this year and at the same pace in 2019, which she said was a good backdrop for needed reforms. She did not give details of the reforms she wanted to see beyond saying authorities needed to move to regulation of activities, not entities. “We need to anticipate where the next crisis will be. Will it be shadow banking? Will it be cryptocurrencies?” she said.