This approach has  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  in a sense stood us in good stead. Counterintuitive as it may seem, is it then that greater external openness, particularly capital account openness, provides a more stable solution to balance of payments problems? As Robert Aumann says, though in a different context, in his Nobel Prize Lecture: “You want to prevent war.
To do that, obviously you should disarm, lower the level of armaments. Right? No, wrong. You might want to do the exact opposite.” Let me give another instance of how the thinking changes. In the 1990’s it was a widely held normative belief, though not uncontested, that capital controls ought to be avoided and free flow of capital promoted.