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Years ago, when I was an economics student, I wrote a paper on the IMF's structural adjustment programs (SAPs/ESAPs) - i.e. those policies that are forced on countries who fail to make their IMF loan payments on time.

I was baffled to discover that >95% of all IMF borrowers went into default (and so fell victim to SAPs). It made no sense to me - why would any finance person continually create unpayable loans? Were they just really bad at their job? And why didn't anyone ever mention their 1/x

Josh Davis

dismal repayment rates in my international econ classes? It really screwed me up, as I knew there was something not right, but I cldn't figure out what...until years later when I heard John Perkins discuss his book 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman.' Then it all made sense. The IMF is simply running a loan sharking operation. The point is for the borrower to default, so the can be forced to sell their national assets & curtail social spending, making their populations ripe for exploitation 2/x

by multinational corporations. Nobody repays their IMF loans because the SAPs are the whole point of the exercise to begin with. We say the IMF is there to help struggling countries develop their economies, when in fact its purpose is to assist foreign investors in stripping assets from countries that are having financial difficulties.

Which is all to say that China would have to do A LOT of evil with their loan programs to catch up to what we've been doing since 1944.

daily.jstor.org/debt-trap-dipl

JSTOR Daily · Debt-Trap Diplomacy - JSTOR DailyHow justified are recent claims that China has been buying significant quantities of debt to undermine the sovereignty of African nations?