The head of the International Monetary Fund said Saturday that the global economic recovery, while moving along faster than expected, was vulnerable to threats posed by long-term unemployment and unsustainable public debts. 'After panic, action and relief is the phase of rebuilding,' said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the monetary fund. Youssef Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian finance minister, who led a meeting of the fund's policymaking committee, said, 'The worst is definitely behind us, but we are not out of the woods yet.' The IMF, which only a few years ago found itself defending its relevance, has assumed a new prominence and increased its lending capacity since the global economic turmoil began in 2007. It extended loans of $2 billion to Latvia and $16 billion to Hungary in 2008, and it is now expected to contribute as much as $20 billion to a bailout of debt-stricken Greece. The Greek finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, met here with Strauss-Kahn; the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet; and the European Union's commissioner for economic and financial affairs, Olli Rehn. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who took part in the meetings, 'encouraged them to move quickly to put in place a package of strong reforms and substantial concrete financial support' for Greece, the Treasury Department said in a statement. Asked about the protests gripping Greece over the joint rescue plan by the IMF and the European Union, Strauss-Kahn said, 'The Greek citizens shouldn't fear the IMF. We are there to try to help them.' The IMF also renewed a pledge to approve a redistribution of power that would lessen the emphasis on the wealthiest countries. Those nations have dominated IMF decision making since the body was founded in 1944, but voting power, which is based on a system of quotas, has not shifted to match the growth of economies in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. At the fund's spring meetings two years ago, the IMF approved a plan for substantial changes in the voting system. To meet a January 2011 deadline, 112 countries representing 85 percent of total voting power need to accept the plan. But so far only 70 nations, representing 73 percent of voting power, have signed on. The Group of 20 endorsed a proposal in October to redistribute 5 percent of the organization's voting power from the wealthiest countries toward emerging economies -- like those of Brazil, Russia, India and China -- and developing nations. 'The goal is to achieve legitimate representation based on countries' economic weight in the world,' Geithner said in a statement. 