These ideas were developed in greater detail by Ms. Krueger in an IMF essay titled "A New Approach to Debt Restructuring," and by Harvard professor Richard N. Cooper in a 2002 article titled "Chapter 11 for Countries" published in Foreign Affairs ("mouthpiece of the powerful New York-Based Elite think-tank, Council on Foreign Relations"). Salbuchi writes:
Here, Cooper very matter-of-factly recommends that "only if the debtor nation cannot restore its financial health are its assets liquidated and the proceeds distributed to its creditors -- again under the guidance of a (global) court" (!).
In Argentina's recent tangle with the vulture funds, Ms. Krueger and the mainstream media have come out in apparent defense of Argentina, recommending restraint by the US court. But according to Salbuchi, this does not represent a change in policy. Rather, the concern is that overly heavy-handed treatment may kill the golden goose:
. . . [I] n today's delicate post-2008 banking system, a new and less controllable sovereign debt crisis could thwart the global elite's plans for an "orderly transition towards a new global legal architecture" that will allow orderly liquidation of financially-failed states like Argentina. Especially if such debt were to be collateralized by its national territory (what else is left!?)
Breaking Free from the Sovereign Debt Trap
Salbuchi traces Argentina's debt crisis back to 1955, when President Juan Domingo Perà ³n was ousted in a very bloody US/UK/mega-bank-sponsored military coup:
Perà ³n was hated for his insistence on not indebting Argentina with the mega-bankers: in 1946 he rejected joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF); in 1953 he fully paid off all of Argentina's sovereign debt. So, once the mega-bankers got rid of him in 1956, they shoved Argentina into the IMF and created the "Paris Club" to engineer decades-worth of sovereign debt for vanquished Argentina, something they've been doing until today.
Many countries have been subjected to similar treatment, as John Perkins documents in his blockbuster expose Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. When the country cannot pay, the IMF sweeps in with refinancing agreements with strings attached, including selling off public assets and slashing public services in order to divert government revenues into foreign debt service.
Even without pressure from economic hit men, however, governments routinely indebt themselves for much more than they can ever hope to repay. Why do they do it? Salbuchi writes:
Here, Western economists, bankers, traders, Ivy League academics and professors, Nobel laureates and the mainstream media have a quick and monolithic reply: because all nations need"investment and investors" if they wish to build highways, power plants, schools, airports, hospitals, raise armies, service infrastructures and a long list of et ceteras . . . .
But more and more people are starting to ask a fundamental common-sense question: why should governments indebt themselves in hard currencies, decades into the future with global mega-bankers, when they could just as well finance these projects and needs far more safely by issuing the proper amounts of their own local sovereign currency instead?
Neoliberal experts shout back that government-created money devalues the currency, inflates the money supply, and destroys economies. But does it? Or is it the debt service on money created privately by banks, along with other forms of "rent" on capital, that create inflation and destroy economies? As Prof. Michael Hudson points out:
These financial claims on wealth -- bonds, mortgages and bank loans -- are lent out to become somebody else's debts in an exponentially expanding process. . . . [E]conomies have been obliged to pay their debts by cutting back new research, development and new physical reinvestment. This is the essence of IMF austerity plans, in which the currency is "stabilized" by further international borrowing on terms that destabilize the economy at large. Such cutbacks in long-term investment also are the product of corporate raids financed by high-interest junk bonds. The debts created by businesses, consumers and national economies cutting back their long-term direct investment leaves these entities even less able to carry their mounting debt burden.
Spiraling debt also results in price inflation, since businesses have to raise their prices to cover the interest and fees on the debt.
From Sovereign Debt to Monetary Sovereignty
For governments to escape this austerity trap, they need to spend not less but more money on the tangible capital formation that increases physical productivity. But where to get the investment money without getting sucked into the debt vortex? Where can Argentina get funding if the country is shut out of international capital markets?
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