ABSTRACT
Debt as a building block of social systems involves a great deal more than extending loans and collecting interest payments. The modern version of Third World debt servitude began to take shape in the 1950s and 1960s with such industrial white elephants as steel mills. The crisis, from the perspective of the major foreign private banks and the multilateral financial institutions, was most acute in Latin America. The crisis, from the perspective of the major foreign private banks and the multilateral financial institutions, was most acute in Latin America. By the 1990s the crisis was over in the sense that the banks had won an uncontested victory. Microcredit and microenterprise programs are now supported by a multitude of foundations and by major national and multinational donors like United States Agency for International Development and the World Bank. That means among other things that they exert a powerful pull on funds and personnel away from other kinds of grass-roots development programs.
