It seems that the deliberations of the Spence Commission once again involved discussion of the merits of my child (her illegitimate brother, according to my daughter) the Washington consensus. It seems also that my intellectual position on three crucial policy issues put me at odds with a common conception of the Washington Consensus. The three issues are exchange rate policy, capital controls, and privatization.

On exchange rates, I have long favored intermediate regimes to fixed or floating rates, on the grounds that there are other objectives besides avoiding speculative crises, notably avoiding Dutch disease, and that one can tame capital movements by other techniques than allowing exchange rates to float. The Washington consensus has sometimes been interpreted as implying support for the bipolar position that one has to fix or float and cannot logically do anything in between: see, for example, Dani Rodrik’s augmented Washington consensus. So Williamson is against the Washington consensus, certainly in its augmented version.