The IMF and World Bank have joined the search for a new crisis management model that could replace the now defunct neoliberalism. The BWI-at-80 report prepared for the World Bank and IMF on the 80th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Agreement (the beginning of U.S. hegemony), starts by admitting- quoting Gramsci's famous words, "the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters"- that we are in  a period where capitalism has become monstrous.

Indeed, as discussed in this column for some time, neoliberalism's function as a "crisis management model" from the 1980s to 2008 was to suppress wages and social rights, privatize public sector services, liberalize finance, impose austerity, and offload crises from the centres of the capitalist world economy onto periphery. After 2008, this model lost both its political and economic efficiency and its legitimacy; the climate crisis, debt spiral, and inequality explosion can no longer sustain such crisis transfer.

The New Crisis Management Architecture

The BWI-at-80 report seeks to design a new crisis management architecture around the IMF and World Bank to escape this impasse. The search for a new model goes beyond the neoliberalism. In the old neoliberal model, "crisis management" involved shrinking demand through shock programs, suppressing wages, pruning the welfare state, and liberalizing trade and capital movements to open new “hunting” grounds for private capital. In the new tentatively emerging model, crisis is no longer seen as a temporary deviation to be overcome; it is treated as a permanent existential condition where climate, debt, and inequality intersect.

This new crisis management model rises on three axes. First, a shift at the level of objectives. The goal is no longer just price stability and investor confidence; it is a long-term structural transformation. But this structural transformation is not through more “neoliberal reforms,” but quite the opposite. They are related to climate resilience and reducing social inequalities. In other words, in the report, crisis management is coded not as an effort to "return the market to its old equilibrium," but as an opportunity to transform fragile production and financial structures.

Second, transformation is also in the toolkit. Neoliberal crisis management offered a "narrow prescription" built around austerity, privatization, and capital account liberalization. The report proposes protecting fiscal space, not cutting social and climate spending, and redefining debt sustainability together with development and climate investments. What was seen as an "extraordinary deviation" within the neoliberal model-managing (restricting) capital movements and macroprudential measures- is viewed, in the search of a new model, as legitimate policy instruments,.

Third, the actors and financing architecture are also changing. In the neoliberal model, global crisis management positioned private capital as the "engine" and states and multilateral institutions like the IMF as "firefighters saving the market." In the search for a new model, the volatile and fragile nature of private finance is acknowledged; the backbone is formed by large-scale public and concessional finance, redesigned SDR usage, more ambitious debt cancellation and restructuring mechanisms, and regional development banks. The IMF and World Bank are being pushed into the role of "collective investors" for green and equitable transformation, not just as disciplinarians.

Governance and Knowledge Shift

The report's search for a new forms of crisis management also involves a rupture in the levels of governance and knowledge. In the neoliberal era, the "one true technical knowledge" was produced in core countries' institutions and imposed on peripheral countries as conditionality. Here, there is a call for increasing representation of the Global South, changing leadership norms, and integrating local knowledge, labour and civil society into the process.

Ultimately, this report attempts to design a new crisis management paradigm in a more negotiated framework that is "climate-compatible, inequality-sensitive, and public-finance-weighted," seeking new legitimacy in place of the neoliberalism's stalled and discredited crisis management model. The shape of this new model will largely depend on global balances of power: Peripheral countries' capacity to defend national interests, domestic capital’s and imperialism's impositions, and peoples' capacity to endure or rebel against them. After all, as the report emphasizes, we are in a period where capitalism produces monsters like fascist movements, demagogue leaders, imperialist competitions for hegemony, ruthless predatory debt -extraction regimes, and uncontrolled climate disasters.