The chances are you won’t have read the OECD Code of Liberalisation of Capital Movements. But this dry 150-page book is perhaps the single most important document in modern capitalism. An obscure set of legal articles agreed in 1961, it signalled one of the biggest shifts in economic history: a commitment by the Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development (OECD), the world’s developed economies, to end their capital controls.

We are apt to forget these days that capital controls — limits on how much money households and businesses can funnel in and out of a country — were once an accepted part of how everyone ran their economies. They were the cog in the machine that enabled governments to fix exchange rates and freely