I happen to think that only countries that have strong bank regulatory systems should encourage large-scale international capital flows. The IMF has (I think mistakenly) pushed for capital account liberalization in general.
The IMF staff are (I think) now beating up on the U.S. because they are scared of the extent to which the U.S. is now a debtor country, and fear the international consequences of a panic in Tokyo or Frankfurt that tries to pull money out of the U.S. IMF staff have strenuously argued in the past half decade that the Federal Reserve should reduce interest rates because higher U.S. interest rates increase the vulnerability of other countries to financial crisis. The IMF had nothing to do with the origins of the Mexican or East Asian crises, although it was very helpful in reducing the size of the first; in the second its money was very useful, its commands that surpluses be run and that banks be closed without thoroughgoing banking sector reform were not.
What examples are you thinking of? Do you really believe that it was fine for the U.S. and Canada to use capital from the industrial core to finance their industrialization, but that it is not fine for developing countries today to do the same?
Brad Delong