Given all this, you might think that the limited success of "austerity in the Global South" would encourage a rethink of these policies. In one quarter, it did. The IMF's sister institution the World Bank produced a report in 2005 that pretty much acknowledged the near total failure of the Washington Consensus checklist of reforms. But the IMF, echoing the classical liberal tradition, produced an evaluation the same year that argued the opposite. Indeed, according to the IMF report, the only thing that failed was, as ever, countries' implementation of the reforms, which left the content of the reforms both unquestioned and untouched.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 444