The managing director of the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that the global recovery is growing stronger but still is very fragile, calling on the international community to give her organization "more firepower" to help keep tottering economies from going under. "We certainly need more resources," Christine Lagarde told the annual meeting of The Associated Press, without specifying how much more was needed. The IMF currently has about $400 billion in resources that it can use to provide loans to countries in trouble. Lagarde has talked about expanding those resources to close to $1 trillion. The 17 countries that use the euro have already promised to provide $200 billion (150 billion euros) of that amount. Lagarde said the global economy is making some advances in digging itself out of the worst downturn in decades, but that the recovery remains particularly frail in Europe. "America has a large stake" in how Europe and the rest of the world fares," Lagarde said. The IMF official said it is important to continue and expand emergency programs among the 17 countries that use the euro to help heavily indebted countries there. Stubbornly high unemployment is straining the seams of society. ....Rising oil prices are clearly another cloud on the horizon. Lagarde's remarks came after the Eurozone countries on Friday boosted their emergency bailout funds for heavily indebted countries to $1.1 trillion (800 billion euros). On Tuesday, she said, since the Europeans have moved first to raise their firewall, "the time has come to increase our firepower." While short of what the IMF had hoped for, it was a good first step - and something she said the IMF could work with. During a brief question-and-answer period, Lagarde was asked whether some of the more debt-burdened countries would be better off leaving the group. As to the size of the eurozone and whether Greece, Portugal and whoever else should or should not be in, you know, it's a very deeply rooted sentiment that the Europeans, particularly from that area, have, that what they have built over the last 50 years or so, right after the second World War, is something that they are very, very attached to. "And from discussions I've had with many leaders, including from the lead countries in the Eurozone, I don't think that there is any political intention, disclosed or hidden, to actually break up that zone," she said.