The on-line
Jubilee 2000 article is great: It may have been what motivated me to go to Fukuoka for the Jubilee 2000 march drring the Kyushu/Okinawa G-8 summit. I have the
Rogue States book around here somewhere but I don't think I got very far into it. Curiously, I seem to be able to finish more serious books with an ebook reader. I can switch back and forth among docs, a novel, and a heavy (economic, military, systemic, I guess) atrocity book without losing any of them. And then I can stay engaged while taking a reading break by getting the .epub up on a real PC screen for quoting and checking out the sources... The book's version is better: I guess it's been edited and probably gone through iterative development as the article is worked over and used for the basis of talks too. The book's
Jubilee 2000 chapter has a lot more sources, and I noticed a line that had been made more precise too.
.> A complementary approach might invoke the old-fashioned capitalist idea that those who borrow are responsible for repayment, and those who lend take the risk.
...
Whatever the system we have now is, it might not even by "capitalist" it's just
corruption decorated with vague images about what Adam Smith mentioned like "the invisible hand" and not his aim which was that freedom would bring about equality. (That' s in another Chomsky work: the
Democracy and Education speech he gave at Loyola Univeristy in the 90s).
.> The banks were eager to lend and upbeat about the prospects. On the eve of the 1982 disaster Citibank director Walter Wriston, known in the financial world as “the greatest recycler of them all,” described Latin American lending as so risk-free that commercial banks could safely treble Third World loans (as proportion of assets). After disaster struck, Citibank declared that “we don’t feel unduly exposed” in Brazil, which had doubled bank debt in the preceding 4 years, with Citibank exposure in Brazil alone greater than 100% of capital. In 1986, after the collapse of the international lending boom in which he was a prime mover, Wriston wrote that “events of the past dozen years would seem to suggest that we [bankers] have been doing our job [of risk assessment] reasonably well”; true enough, if we factor in the ensuing socialization of risk, welcomed by Wriston and others famous for their contempt of government and adulation of the free market.
...
.> Failure of prediction is no sin; fundamental elements of the international economy “are only dimly understood” (Jeffrey Sachs). It is, however, hard to overlook the observation that “bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups” (Paul Krugman). Confidence in what is serviceable is also fortified by blind faith in the “religion” that markets know best (Joseph Stiglitz).14 The religion is, furthermore, as hypocritical as it is fanatic. Over the centuries, “free market theory” has been double-edged: market discipline is just fine for the poor and defenseless, but the rich and powerful take shelter under the wings of the nanny state.
.> Jeffrey Sachs, “International Economics: Unlocking the Mysteries of Globalization, “Foreign Policy (Spring 1998); Paul Krugman, “Cycles of Conventional Wisdom on Economic Development,” International Affairs 71:4 (Oct. 1995). Joseph Stiglitz, “Some Lessons from the East Asian Miracle,” World Bank Research Observer 11:2 (Aug. 1996). Stiglitz was soon to be appointed chief economist of the World Bank. For his reflections on the East Asian crisis, see his WIDER Annual Lectures 2, UN University, 1997; “An Agenda for Development in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1997, IBRD, 1998.
.> Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers; Cheryl Payer, Lent and Lost (Zed, 1991).
https://chomsky.info/19980515/#
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Jubilee2000
