Why the IMF Changed its Mind about Capital Controls

On Triple Crisis, Ilene Grabel was the first to highlight the IMF’s change in position on capital controls. In this new video for the Guardian and in a related article for Foreign Policy magazine, Triple Crisis blogger Kevin Gallagher also notes the IMF’s acceptance of capital controls and argues that the US should follow suit and stop outlawing the use of controls through its trade and investment agreements.

Read “Control That Capital”, from Foreign Policy, along with more of Gallagher’s research on foreign investment for development.

Not Your Grandfather’s IMF: The emergence of policy space in the wake of global economic crisis?

Ilene Grabel

When things have been so bleak for so long, when yesterday’s mistakes routinely become tomorrow’s blueprints, it is understandable that we fail to recognize change when it begins to unfold. This is certainly true of those of us who for so long have railed against the extension of neo-liberalism across the global South at the hands of the IMF/World Bank, Wall Street, leading governments, neo-liberal reformers in the developing world and the economics profession. Faced with a juggernaut of this sort, surely we can forgive ourselves for failing to recognize, let alone take any hope in, signs of change.

Forgiven, that is, if the stakes weren’t so high. But they are very high—and so we can’t be quite so self-forgiving if in fact our pessimism leads us to discount too readily evidence of aperture that could be exploited to bring about the kind of change in ideas and policies that the developing world so badly needs. This insight should warn us against premature conclusions that nothing has or can change.

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