Is the IMF Backtracking on Supporting Neoliberal Ideas

because it found they have been ruinous?

Miracles never cease:

The annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund was notable in marking the fund's effort to distance itself from its own long-standing tenets on capital controls and labor-market flexibility. It appears that a new IMF has gradually, and cautiously, emerged under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.


Slightly more than 13 years ago, at the IMF's 1997 Hong Kong meeting, the fund had attempted to amend its charter in order to gain more leeway to push countries toward capital-market liberalization. The timing could not have been worse: The East Asia crisis was just brewing—a crisis that was largely the result of capital-market liberalization in a region that, given its high savings rate, had no need for it.

Of course if these fools had cracked open a history book in the first place, they'd have known pursuing a Friedmanite agenda was a recipe for disaster and complete failure.

Mixed economies work best. We know this, and it's high time to return to it.