THE Federal Reserve's decision to keep trimming its economic stimulus drew fire on Friday as the Reserve Bank of India's chief said Americans should be more attuned to the global impact of their policies, and the IMF called for vigilance given strains in financial markets.

The push-back came on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's last day on the job and two days after the US central bank reduced the pace of its huge asset purchase program. The Fed made the move on Wednesday despite a bruising selloff in emerging markets that was prompted in part by the prospect of less US monetary support.

With the turmoil in currencies and stocks spreading into more emerging markets on Friday, Fed officials, addressing the rout for the first time, offered no hint the sell-off would influence their policy stance unless the US economy were threatened.

But in Mumbai, India's central bank chief Raghuram Rajan said the United States "should worry about the effects of its policies on the rest of the world."

"We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of their own country, " he said at an event on organised by The Times of India newspaper.

Financial markets in India, Turkey,

Argentina and elsewhere have boomed in recent years as the Fed's measures to bolster economic growth at home - including asset purchases and ultra-low interest rates - encouraged investors to seek higher returns in emerging economies.

As the Fed began to talk of unwinding its policy last year, the money began to flow back out, a trend that ramped up again in the last two weeks on signs that China's economy is slowing.

Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is well respected by central bankers globally as being among the few who spoke out about signs of trouble in markets well before the 2007-09 financial crisis set off the Great Recession.

His comments were echoed by the IMF, which on Friday called on central banks to ensure that a financial market rout in the developing world does not lead to an international funding crunch.

"The turbulence also underscores the need for vigilance among central banks over liquidity conditions in international capital markets," an IMF spokesman said.

The pressure, however, is unlikely to dissuade the Fed from ramping down its asset purchases by later this year unless the turbulence starts to derail recent momentum in the US economy. Fed policymakers did not mention emerging markets in a statement on Wednesday, when they unanimously decided to trim bond-buying by another $ 10 billion per month.