IMF head says may be yuan changes in coming months

China's yuan is still "very much undervalued", the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday, although he added that a focus on domestic growth could lead to changes "in the coming months".

"The crisis has been the trigger for the Chinese economy to move to a more traditional model of growth," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said during a lecture in Johannesburg.

"What goes with this kind of policy is a revaluation of the Chinese currency," he said. "We may get changes in the coming months."

The yuan has been locked in place against the dollar for nearly two years, as Beijing has effectively re-pegged its exchange rate to buffer China's economy against the ravages of the global financial crisis.

Strauss-Kahn also described increased savings rates by American households since the financial crisis as a "huge change in the global economy" that would start to address the structural imbalances between Asia and the United States.

However, he said the Chinese and other emerging market consumers were still a long way off being the engine of world growth to replace the United States.

"You are not going to replace the American consumer with the Asian consumer just in a few weeks," he said. "You don't change the route of a big ship like this one overnight."

As a result, the world economy was now in uncharted territory, he said.

"We're not going back to business as usual," he said. "The growth model of the global economy is basically unknown."