Debt crisis

• Greece already defaulted on the creditors’ terms; what they fear is default on the debtor’s terms

  by Christina Laskaridis

  19 May 2012

  Whether Greece will default on its debt obligations and what the consequences of that might be has been headline news following elections on 6th May and the seismic shift in the political landscape. The threat of the electorate voting anti-austerity and the uncertainty around government formation still feeds the Greek news and international press with daily predictions and estimations of what a default might look like and what it would mean for stability in the eurozone. Mysteriously (...)

• Zombie banks are dragging Ireland into the ground

  by Nick Dearden

  25 January 2012

  Just like many African nations, Ireland’s debts must be cancelled or a ’financial bomb’ will go off in its most deprived communities Activists more accustomed to campaigning against the debts of countries like Zimbabwe, Egypt, Ecuador and Indonesia were instead outside the Irish embassy this morning. Dressed as zombies, we hoped to shed some light on the so-called "zombie banks" whose debts continue to drain resources from an Irish public sector that is being slashed to the bone. Ireland’s (...)

• Jamaica’s crippling debt crisis must serve as a warning to Greece

  by Mark Weisbrot

  29 August 2011

  The experience of debt-ridden Jamaica shows the damage done when the interests of creditors are given too much weight. As the eurozone authorities move closer to the accepting the inevitable Greek debt default/restructuring, there are some who have pointed to the Jamaican debt restructuring of last year as a model. It’s hard to imagine a worse disaster for Greece. It is worth a closer look at what has been done to Jamaica, not only as a warning to Greece, but to shed some light on the (...)

• End financial control of European governance

  by Susan George, Nick Buxton

  9 August 2011

  We need Eurobonds and a new charter for Europe The Euro crisis is clear evidence that we need to break out of the economic straight-jacket imposed by the Lisbon Treaty, the European Central Bank and the over-powerful financial sector. You became well-known for your work on the debt crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Then it was a crisis for developing countries; now it seems to be mainly afflicting developed countries? How do you explain this? The causes of the debt crisis in third world (...)

• Facing the debt crisis in Europe

  
  by Damien Millet, Eric Toussaint

  15 July 2011

  One of the avatars of the financial sector crisis that began in 2007 in the United States and spread like wildfire to Europe, is the enthusiasm shown by Western European banks (especially German and French banks, but also Belgian, Dutch, British, Luxembourgish and Irish ones) in using funds lent or donated massively by the Federal Reserve and the ECB to increase their loans to several Eurozone countries between 2007 and 2009 (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) racking up juicy profits due (...)

• From the Global North to the Global South: debt in its many states (1st part)

  The debt in developing countries: a dangerous unconcern

  
  by Eric Toussaint

  7 January 2011

  Summary of the first part: Both in absolute figures and in percentage of their gross domestic product, industrialized countries are more highly indebted that developing countries. The crisis has different consequences in the North and in the South. The conjuncture seems to be temporarily favourable to governments of developing countries, but whether this situation can last depends on policies in China and industrialized countries. An unfavourable turn is possible. In such conditions the (...)

• Financial and trade perspectives on external debt with reference to LDCs and India

  by V. Jacob John

  6 January 2011

  Presented at the CADTM South Asia in Colombo, Sri Lanka, December 9-11, 2010 Introduction Among the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and targets launched by United Nations since 2000, Goal 8 pertains to develop a ‘Global partnership for development between Developed Countries’ (DCs) and Developing Countries (LDCs) assumes great significance as far as the global debt of the LDCs is concerned, in items 8.10 to 8.16. Some of the salient features are as follows: 8.10: Debt sustainability (...)

• A Global Justice Perspective on the Irish EU-IMF Loans: Lessons from the Wider World

  by Debt and Development Coalition Ireland

  23 December 2010

  This document outlines lessons from the global debt justice movement, provides a background to the Irish EU‐IMF loans (up to the 28th November 2010), and offers some recommendations based on these lessons from DDCI. It also flags up recommendations from other groups.

• Grameen Bank and `microcredit’: The `wonderful story’ that never happened

  by Patrick Bond, Khorshed Alam

  28 October 2010

  Far from being a panacea for fighting rural poverty, microcredit can impose additional burdens on the rural poor, without markedly improving their socio-economic condition, write Patrick Bond and Khorshed Alam. October 21, 2010 — Pambazuka News — For years, the example of microcredit in Bangladesh has been touted as a model of how the rural poor can lift themselves out of poverty. This widely held perception was boosted in 2006 when Mohammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, the microfinance (...)

• Stages in the new debt deflation fisher-minsky crisis

  by Arturo Guillén R.

  19 June 2009

  1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to analyze the current phase of the global crisis that began in the United States in 2007 as a financial crisis linked to sub-prime mortgages. The current phase, which began during the last quarter of 2008, is characterized by the interaction of the financial crisis —far from having been overcome— and the deepening and universal expansion of the recession in production. I will go into this in greater detail further along. Section 2 summarizes my (...)

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