Sometimes financial crises make policy-makers stop and rethink whether they know what they think they know about how economies work and what the proper economic policy responses should be to prevent and mitigate such crises. Was this time different? It has been well established that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was generally skeptical for the regulation of cross-border financial flows from the 1980s to the run up to the global financial crisis (Abdelal, 2007; Chweiroth, 2009; Moschella, 2010; Gallagher, 2015). In the wake of the crisisthe IMF surprised many observers by openly embracing capital controls to both prevent and mitigate financial crises. The IMF supported the use of capital controls on inflows in a number of countries such as Brazil and South Korea (Gallagher, 2015). Mostsurprising to many wasthe IMF’s outright advocacy for the use of capital controls on outflows in Iceland as part of that country’s post crisis stand-by-agreement (Sigurgeirsdottir and Wade, 2015). In some ways, advocating for the appropriate use of capital controls is new policy at the IMF. In 2012, the IMF adopted a ‘new institutional view’ on capital account liberalization and controls that states that capital account liberalization is not always optimal and that under certain conditions capital controls on inflows and outflows can be appropriate to prevent and mitigate financial instability (IMF, 2012). Thisshift hasreceived a significant amount of attention, however there is yet to be a rigorous account of whether the IMF has put its new words into action. This paper sets out to do just that.