What's the Difference?

Imagine for a moment that you are down on your luck financially. You have bills to pay and people depending on you and you just don't have the financial resources to do the things you wish you could. You've been to the banks but they've seen people like you before and they want nothing to do with you. So a friend tells you about a guy they know who deals in special cases. Lends when nobody else will. The catch is that borrowing from this guy isn't like borrowing from a bank. For one thing, if you can't make your payments you can't just declare bankruptcy to make him go away. And for another, if you're having trouble paying this guy back he's likely to come and make some friendly 'suggestions' for how you could do things differently and maybe sell off some of the stuff you own to make your payments. And these suggestions will be backed up by the unspoken threat of the harm which may come to the people who depend on you if you don't follow them.

So here's my question, is the scenario I'm talking about just some guy with a family who doesn't have a job and ends up going to the local loan shark and getting himself in even deeper, or is the scenario really about a poor 'developing' nation that gets lured into borrowing billions of dollars from the World Bank and gets forced into structural adjustments, financial crises or interest payments which exceed their health and education budgets when the loans don't generate the necessary return to repay them.

Which brings me to my second question - is there a difference?

Random Thought for the Day

I ran across this article on Yahoo about the (very commendable) reductions in Iraq's debt load, which have been spearheaded by the U.S.

And I couldn't help wondering about the human benefits which could be achieved if the U.S. were to devote the same political will towards forgiveness of the debts of all the destitute countries around the world.

I imagine the citizens of the poorest countries, where the money which goes to debt repayment dwarfs spending on health care, fighting aids, etc, must be wondering, as I am, why it's possible to achieve such massive reductions in Iraq's debt, but progress is so painfully slow (or nonexistent) everywhere else.

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Edited to add that if you want to get some background on this issue, the Jubilee USA network is a good source, the news links down the right side of their homepage provide a pretty good background of recent developments on this issue.