During your education, did you learn that during the 1930s the government of the USA unceremoniously repudiated a central provision of debt contracts that represented phenomenal sums?

According to a new report published by Oxfam, the richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth.

The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help. Loans must be repaid with interest and are tied to conditions that reinforce neoliberal policies.

The answer is plain to see: the two explanations are not contradictory. A combination of the two enables us to understand what has been happening right before our eyes.

In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg devoted an entire chapter to international loans in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter.