The openness of capital accounts means that the world today is very different from that of the Bretton Woods era. Capital flows - both public and private – are very large. And, for many countries, private capital flows now dwarf official flows. Because domestic demand is no longer constrained by current national output, a current account deficit does not necessarily indicate any "fundamental disequilibrium" nor require any official help to finance. For example, New Zealand received the largest annual disbursement of any industrialised country as a share of GDP during the Bretton Woods era: 1.9% in 1967. That was associated with a current account deficit of 3.7% of GDP. Since 1990, New Zealand's current account deficit has averaged more than that, but it has had no need of an IMF  2  BIS Review 11/2006  programme to finance these deficits. Indeed, the need for official financing for industrialised countries has become redundant. 3 Many of the "imbalances" that reflect private decisions to save and invest are desirable because they improve the efficiency with which capital is allocated throughout the world. Since it is difficult to measure “equilibrium” flows of capital from one country to another, it is equally difficult to define meaningfully “fundamental equilibrium” exchange rates. As Alan Greenspan has pointed out, current account deficits and surpluses are now the norm rather than the exception.
He hoped that the Bretton Woods twins, Master Fund and Miss Bank, would receive three gifts from their fairy-godmothers: first, a many-coloured coat “as a perpetual reminder that they belong to the whole world”; second, a box of vitamins to encourage “energy and a fearless spirit, which does not shelve and avoid difficult issues, but welcomes them and is determined to solve them”; third, “a spirit of wisdom … so that their approach to every problem is absolutely objective”. Keynes warned the delegates that this was asking a great deal: “there is scarcely any enduringly successful experience yet of an international body which has fulfilled the hopes of its progenitors”. So he hoped that the malicious fairy would not bring its curse upon the twins: “you two brats shall grow up politicians; your every thought and act shall have an arrière-pensée; everything you determine shall not be for its own sake or on its own merits but because of something else". And if the IMF were to become politicised then, Keynes said, it would be best for the twins "to fall into an 2 eternal slumber, never to waken or be heard of again in the courts and markets of Mankind". Sixty years on, the wisdom of Keynes's position at Savannah is clear. In recent years, the critics have charged that all three of the virtues of universalism, energy and wisdom have been lacking in the IMF. And if not in a deep slumber, then the Fund has appeared drowsy.