ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a straightforward guide to the debt-cum-banking-cumdevelopment crises that have rocked so many countries over the past twenty years. It also challenges those conventional stories of ‘the debt crisis’ which begin their accounts with the Mexican default of August 1982 and which work their way back to the OPEC oil price rises of 1973-4. These accounts spotlight the debt crises that affected Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s (and which threatened the commercial banking system of the United States), when a debtcum-development crisis has been at least as severe in many parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The conventional account also concentrates attention on the destabilizing actions of a small group of countries in the ‘Middle East’ in the mid-1970s. As such, it fails to recognize certain changes in the international financial system that have led to a massive expansion of private credit monies over the past thirty years.
