Dependent as it has always been on overseas funds to supplement domestic savings, Australia has been swamped and drained by a succession of surges of international capital, flooded in the 1880s and parched in the 1890s, unusually favoured in the 1920s and required to remit the favours in the 1930s, doing well in a highly regulated world environment between 1939 and the 1960s, and then experiencing inflow and interruption three times until the early 1990s. As global constraints on exchange rates and on international capital movements relaxed or disappeared in the last third of the twentieth century the Australian economy adapted, and governments aided adaptation. The nation’s steady performance since the early 1990s is frequently ascribed to the effects of deregulation and microeconomic reform. Yet many of the economies that faltered at some time in the last 20 years – and particularly after 2007 – had themselves adapted domestically to a financially deregulated world, while China, which avoided the East Asian downturn in 1997 and has powered on since 2007, is an authoritarian state. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s (2009) massive survey of banking and financial crises requires us to think again. They find almost no banking crisis anywhere in the world between the early 1950s and the early 1970s, and about 150 subsequent crises up to 2006. Every one of these, they argue – as well as the debacle in the United States from 2007 – was preceded by ‘financial liberalisation’. They include the shaky performance of Australia’s banks at the beginning of the 1990s in their count (see also Kaminsky and Reinhart 1999; Reinhart and Rogoff 2011).