Patricia Adams

We’ve all heard of the Third World’s debt crisis, of hopelessly poor nations unable to pay their debts, and of the human suffering and environmental consequences of their desperate predicament. Amid emotional calls from some to forgive the debt outright come the sober solutions from bankers and bureaucrats, with their seemingly unending stream of Brady and Baker Plans, and bewildering variants of them.

Yet despite the raging world-wide controversy over the Third World’s debt, no one has posed these most elementary questions: who lent what and to whom, where did the money go, what did it do there, and where is it now. In this brilliant hybrid of detective work and policy analysis, Patricia Adams has unraveled a rats’ nest of Third World lending to describe the debt crisis in its startling simplicity.

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