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, loc. 443