The big political risk from restrictions on capital movement is that governments freed from the immediate need to satisfy financial markets may lose the incentive to act sensibly. The classic syndrome in Latin America has been so-called "macroeconomic populism," an attempt to use the printing press as a substitute for realistic accounting and market discipline. When Malaysia imposed its controls, some analysts seem to have imagined that it would soon start behaving like Peru in the 1980s. But it didn't.