Summary |
The International Monetary Fund is the most powerful supra-national government in the world today. The resources it controls and its power to interfere in the internal affairs of borrowing nations give it an authority of which United Nations advocates can only dream. The Debt Trap is about the efforts of poor.
Nations to gain some control over their own economies, and the role of the IMF in frustrating these efforts. Cheryl Payer shows in detail how the system and its principal agents actually work. Her study provides a number of different but related case studies in Asia, Latin America and even Europe (Yugoslavia): but, in addition, she shows the price paid by those countries (Chile, Ghana, North Korea)
Who try to break away from the international loan-sharks.
Skilfully arguing her case, the author shows that the death of democracy in Third World Countries—through military coups or other means—is due to the contradiction between responsibility to an electorate and to foreign creditors represented by the IMF.
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