Postwar IMF Keynesianism concealed classical liberal assumptions derived from 1920s Treasury logic

Evidence

In short, deep beneath the IMF’s Keynesian surface in the 1940s a set of classical liberal assumptions was built into a model of the behavior of states that would not have been out of place in the British Treasury of the 1920s. The Polak model, a mainstay of IMF practice, primed the IMF to accept the conclusions of the Washington Consensus long before Washington Consensus ideas became the austere instruction sheet of the 1990s. That the liberal contradictions at the heart of postwar Keynesianism came into their first flowering at the IMF was not surprising. After all, the top management of this organization was from its inception dominated by people who hailed from central banks, treasuries, and ministries of finance—the institutions in which the “can’t live with it, don’t want to pay for it” form of liberalism was most likely to survive. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mattei’s work on austerity’s institutional carriers — the personnel pipeline from central banks and finance ministries into the IMF. — connects to: Liquidationism and the Treasury view were the original neoliberal ideas — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 271; The liberal funding anxiety hardened into austerity doctrine by the 1920s — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 270; Central banks were treasury financing agents everywhere but Germany until the Keynesian era ended. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 420 (+10 more)
• DEFINE: Names the Polak model as the mechanism embedding classical liberal assumptions into IMF practice.

Broader Connections

• Expansionary fiscal contraction theory emerged despite contradictory IMF field evidence #responds-to (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 446
• Interwar Treasury officials directly linked monetary austerity to unemployment #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1670
• British monetary austerity after 1920 produced an unhealthy quasi-equilibrium for a full decade #qualifies (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1731
• The Treasury and Bank of England used monetary austerity to block the miners’ movement #qualifies (0.72)
• Monetary-credit expansion alone seemed sufficient to cure unemployment in Treasury orthodoxy #corroborates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1695
• Unelected Treasury technocrats orchestrated British austerity without facing re-election #complicates (0.70) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 829