By Louise Egan

MONTREAL (Reuters) - The IMF and World Bank said on Monday the path to global economic recovery is rife with risks and the onus is on policymakers to avoid runaway inflation and other pitfalls that could derail the process.

At a forum in Montreal, International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and World Bank President Robert Zoellick turned their focus to life after the crisis, issuing a list of "do's and don'ts" for governments as they try to nurse their economies back to health.

Strauss-Kahn maintained his forecast for a global economic recovery in early 2010, with the turnaround starting in September and October of this year.

"We still believe, as we've said for months, that the most credible scenario is that the recovery will take place in the first half of 2010 with the turning point in September, October, beginning of growth at the end of this year, and then really the first positive quarter as Q1 or Q2 in 2010," he said.

But he warned that the biggest risk to his outlook is countries taking too long to cleanse toxic assets from their banking systems.

"You never recover until the cleansing of the balance sheet of the financial sector has been completed," Strauss-Kahn said.

For confidence to return, banks should disclose not only losses related to U.S. subprime mortgages but other losses linked to the economic slowdown.

"What we are noticing is that there still is a system of credits, or of losses, that are not made public," he said. "These are not things that are linked today to the original subprime crisis, but to the fact that the economic slowdown has rendered a certain number of assets of poor quality and that new losses were registered."