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Meaningful Debt Relief Probably Isn’t Going to Happen. We Should All be Worried.

by Eric Olander

The Financial Times newspaper deserves a lot of credit for calling out the world’s wealthiest governments for their glaring hypocrisy on the issue of African debt relief. While treasuries in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China come up with new creative solutions to insulate their populations from the effects of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak, they have all but abandoned the world’s poorest countries.

Forget about any moral obligation here, we’re well past that. Debt relief isn’t about doing the “right thing,” instead, these wealthy countries should see that it’s in their own national interests to help stabilize countries in the Global South that are now teetering on the edge of a dangerous precipice.

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