odious debt

Both the “balance-sheet” approach and emotional response can make it challenging to encourage students to think critically about imperialism—by which I mean analyze imperial history using the critical analytical methods developed in recent scholarship, not crude Empire-bashing.

I am in favour of safe spaces. They are necessary because students and staff from underrepresented minority groups often face a host of challenges at universities that make them vulnerable, as the 2015 Runnymede Trust report into Black and Minority Ethnic experiences in the academy shows. However, the idea of a “safe space” can be mobilised to further marginalise minorities in classrooms.

White students, by contrast, often note how unaware of their race they have been throughout their education, even when they have studied subjects in which racism has been a central point of discussion.

Several weeks later, it was very clear that neither Tsipras or Varoufakis were open to publicly, in front of the media, mentioning the work of the commission.

I performed this work with the 30 members of the commission. The work done by the commission, I would say, consists of more than 1500 or 2000 hours of work performed over eight weeks among 30 persons. We worked day and night to produce a very efficient and rigorous report, and my expectation was that there was some possibility that several ministers of the SYRIZA-led government — ministers of the then-SYRIZA faction “Left Platform,” jointly with Zoe Konstantopoulou and the pressure from the streets and from the other radical-left groups and the trade-union left — could pressure the government to use our work. But I was not really very optimistic because I was very well informed about what Varoufakis was doing with his team of advisers. I was receiving clear information about the concessions that he was ready to give to the creditors.

In the first two chapters, we analyze the building of the Greek public and private debt before the crisis. We explain what happened in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century. We showed that the accumulation of debt was linked to huge amounts of military expenses encouraged by the U.S. government and the French and German governments, which are the main sellers of weapons to Greece. We showed also that interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher… The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. paid by Greece at the end of the 20th century increased the debt, as also happened with other peripheral countries.

In reality, the main problem was on the side of the private debt, the debt of the Greek banks, but also other businesses and households. There had been a process of huge growth of the private debt just after the integration of Greece into the Eurozone, because the big French, German, Dutch, and Belgian banks wanted to lend money to Greece, knowing that there was no risk of devaluation Devaluation A lowering of the exchange rate of one currency as regards others. because of the monetary union.

They had a surplus of liquidity Liquidity The facility with which a financial instrument can be bought or sold without a significant change in price. before the crisis of 2007 – 08, and after the crisis because, as you will remember, the Federal Reserve FEDFederal Reserve Officially, Federal Reserve System, is the United States’ central bank created in 1913 by the ’Federal Reserve Act’, also called the ’Owen-Glass Act’, after a series of banking crises, particularly the ’Bank Panic’ of 1907. FED – decentralized central bank : http://www.federalreserve.gov/ of the U.S. and the European Central Bank ECBEuropean Central Bank The European Central Bank is a European institution based in Frankfurt, founded in 1998, to which the countries of the Eurozone have transferred their monetary powers. Its official role is to ensure price stability by combating inflation within that Zone. Its three decision-making organs (the Executive Board, the Governing Council and the General Council) are composed of governors of the central banks of the member states and/or recognized specialists. According to its statutes, it is politically ‘independent’ but it is directly influenced by the world of finance. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/html/index.en.html injected a huge amount of liquidity into the banks. These banks used that money to lend where they were having the better profits, and the countries of the “periphery” — like Greece but also Portugal, Ireland, and Spain — were more profitable than countries like Germany, France, Benelux, the U.K. or the U.S.

impossible to tell voters that we have to once more bail out the private banks.

Toussaint describes the findings of the commission and describes the legal avenues available to Greece for the repudiation of a significant portion of its debt, which he describes as odious and illegitimate. He also criticizes claims made by economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in his recent book regarding the supposed lack of options available to Greece in its negotiations with its lenders in 2015.

FG, which was founded by a pair of former Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers consultants, made the claim because it bought the ''distressed debt'' owed to Energoinvest, the Yugoslav company which financed the construction of a high-voltage electric power transmission line in the Congo in 1980.

On the results of instability, Mbeki said that an important factor that determines whether a country develops or not is, on the one hand, its ability to generate a meaningful economic surplus. On the other hand, it is its ability to direct a large part of that surplus to productive investment rather than merely to private consumption. As a result of Africa's endemic instability, a large part of sub-Saharan Africa's surplus leaves the continent.

Assessing Mbeki’s positions is complicated, as one cannot easily discount the accommodation he made to reach out to his audience. After all this is an audience charged with everything from humanitarian relief to covert anti-terror activities, some of whose operations are alleged to violate fundamental international laws.

Second, Mbeki posits a developmental model based on comparative advantage, but he does not explain its failure even though it has implemented in many parts of Africa for over 30 years. Yet Mbeki does not hesitate to put the blame ‘in the final analysis’ squarely on African leaders themselves, even though he glosses over the evidence produced by the developmental model he endorses, which north of the Limpopo was foisted on many African countries in the most dastardly circumstances.

But with Africa losing an estimated US$148 billion in development finance each year, 60 per cent as a result of multinational mispricing, in addition to the direct servicing of odious debts – (amounting to a global figure of US$560 billion per annum of an outstanding US$2.9 trillion), little or no rents derived from the liquidation of exhaustible resources is redistributed in intangible capital. This is precisely because across Africa citizens are not required to finance the state budget – as occurs in high-income countries through intangible capital – they lack the political representation necessary to influence policies and usurped power structures.

The terms differ from country to country, with the bulk of Ghana’s leased land allocated for export, in contrast to Ethiopia’s mixed status, but the issue remains one of control and exploitation, whether it is over local food monopolies or exported crops.

over 100 known specialised land funds and investments firms have embarked on ‘private sector’ land grabs, including well-known entities such as Morgan Stanley. Facilitating this process is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank group, ensuring for investors the ‘enabling environments’ and positive ‘investment climates’ required for the extractive industries, such as repatriation of profits and tax ‘competition’. From 1991-2002, deregulation proposed by IFIs composed 95 per cent of changes implemented in host countries.