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In recent years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has re-emerged as a central actor in global economic governance. Its rhetoric and policies suggest that the organization has radically changed the ways in which it offers financial assistance to countries in economic trouble. We revisit two long-standing controversies: Has the policy content of IMF programmes evolved to allow for more policy space? Do these programmes now allow for the protection of labour and social policies? We collected relevant archival material on the IMF's lending operations and identified all policy conditionality in IMF loan agreements between 1985 and 2014, extracting 55,465 individual conditions across 131 countries in total. We find little evidence of a fundamental transformation of IMF conditionality. The organization's post-2008 programmes re-incorporated many of the mandated reforms that the organization claims to no longer advocate and the number of conditions has been increasing. We also find that policies introduced to ameliorate the social consequences of IMF macroeconomic advice have been inadequately incorporated into programme design. Drawing on this evidence, we argue that multiple layers of rhetoric and ceremonial reforms have been designed to obscure the actual practice of adjustment programmes, revealing an escalating commitment to hypocrisy. 'Structural adjustments? That was before my time. I have no idea what it is. We don't do that any more. No, seriously, you have to realise that we have changed the way in which we offer our financial support.'-Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director (IMF 2014g). 'Having known the history of [IMF] programmes, […in Iceland] the IMF was really rather flexible. I can't really make sense of this new, cuddly IMF; it can't possibly last.'-Martin Wolf, Financial Times chief economics commentator (Wolf 2011). 1 In addition, the organization's Research Department has also published new research as 'Staff Discussion Notes' (Dabla-Norris et al. 2013; 2015; Ostry, Berg, and Tsangarides 2014) that often go beyond official IMF line, as expressed in press releases, policy statements, or factsheets. The extent to which these findings are taken up in programme design is unclear, but recently, the IMF's own Independent Evaluation Office (IEO 2011 p. vii) reported 'a widespread view among IMF staff' that research findings were misaligned with the organization's policies. These issues are not further explored here.

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