Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in sovereign debt began as a UN economist in the 1980s. We detailed statistics on the stark impact of the crises and watched Latin American presidents plead for help in the General Assembly. Based in New York, I got invited to some meetings of major banks that held problem debt, wouldn’t admit it, but ultimately had to accept losses. African countries in crisis were mainly in debt to official creditors that also did not want to accept losses. Over time, the types of creditors changed and changed again, and debt crises kept reappearing, being fixed, reappearing until today. This is dramatic stuff. How could I not be interested?


I edited

Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises

By Barry Herman (editor), Jose Antonio Ocampo (editor), Shari Spiegel (editor)

Book cover of Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises

What is my book about?

Even more than a decade after publication, this book continues to be read as its 20 authors captured well the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of COVID-19 and Sovereign Debt: The Case of SADC

Barry Herman Why did I love this book?

In this recent book from South Africa, a group of mostly African academics and lawyers, including some young researchers, examine the financial stresses that COVID put on the sovereign debt burden of countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), including studies of Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The authors view the debt constraints on SADC governments from an economic, financial, and human rights perspective, domestically and in interacting with international institutions, including limits on available debt relief.

The book also contains proposals to evade such crises in the future, including in a chapter by your correspondent.

The book is available in French and Portuguese as well as English, and you can download a copy for free. What could be better? 

Book cover of Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Barry Herman Why did I love this book?

If you hung around Occupy Wall Street in 2012, you might recall a charismatic, somewhat disheveled young anarchist named David Graeber.

He was also a brilliant anthropologist who organized “The Very Boring Book Club” in his living room, where members read his astounding new book.

It seems the essential economic transaction all through recorded history in Western and Asian civilizations was not buying and selling by independent actors, despite what economists proclaim, but lending and borrowing.

When you get your head around this perspective, you can make more sense of world history up to today.

David was also an engaging writer despite being a serious academic (he died in 2020), who put 100 pages of notes and bibliography in a small font at the end of the book.

By David Graeber,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Debt as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its head—from the “brilliant, deeply original political thinker” David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me)
 
Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So…


Book cover of Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance

Barry Herman Why did I love this book?

Most debts embody a legal contract specifying how and when the borrowed funds will be repaid and any circumstances in which the obligation can be amended.

Non-payment of most loan contracts end up before a judge whose decisions on repayment are guided by a national bankruptcy law. Debts of sovereign states differ.

Insolvent governments negotiate partial or delayed repayment with their various creditors. The starting point is always that the contracts must be honored.

Professor Lienau argues that there are instances in legal theory and historically in practice in which governments did not and should not have had to repay “illegitimate” debts. She calls for international recognition of a legally enforceable concept of “responsible” lending and borrowing.

Imagine how that might make creditors think twice about lending to oppressive regimes?

By Odette Lienau,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rethinking Sovereign Debt as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Conventional wisdom holds that all nations must repay debt. Regardless of the legitimacy of the regime that signs the contract, a country that fails to honor its loan obligations damages its reputation, inviting still greater problems down the road. Yet difficult dilemmas arise from this assumption. Should today's South Africa be responsible for apartheid-era debt? Is it reasonable to tether postwar Iraq with Saddam Hussein's excesses?

Rethinking Sovereign Debt is a probing historical analysis of how sovereign debt continuity--the rule that nations should repay loans even after a major regime change, or expect reputational consequences--became the consensus approach. Odette Lienau…


Book cover of Sovereign Debt and Human Rights

Barry Herman Why did I love this book?

When people talk about human rights and sovereign debt, it is usually when the government cannot pay its obligations and squeezes its citizens in the effort.

Who will speak up to protect those people? Thirty authors (including your correspondent) aim to do just that.

While one essay claims that creditor (property) rights trump human rights in international law, most of the authors discuss how to bring human rights into the legal landscape governing different types of foreign loans or investment, or how to protect the rights to food, health, education and more when the International Monetary Fund and creditors demand austerity.

Other essays propose international legal reforms (including arbitral, soft law, and “anti-vulture” litigation). Scholars, activists, or just the curious will want to consult this important and thoroughly accessible volume.

By Ilias Bantekas (editor), Cephas Lumina (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Sovereign Debt and Human Rights as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Sovereign debt is necessary for the functioning of many modern states, yet its impact on human rights is underexplored in academic literature. This volume provides the reader with a step-by-step analysis of the debt phenomenon and how it affects human rights. Beginning by setting out the historical, political and economic context of sovereign debt, the book goes on to address the human rights dimension of the policies and activities of the three types of sovereign
lenders: international financial institutions (IFIs), sovereigns and private lenders.

Bantekas and Lumina, along with a team of global experts, establish the link between debt and…


Book cover of Sovereign Debt: A Guide for Economists and Practitioners

Barry Herman Why did I love this book?

Government borrowing is the golden goose that makes possible investment in public infrastructure and continuing expenditures despite temporary shortfalls in tax revenue.

But when not managed well or when rocked by unforeseen catastrophes, sovereign debt can become an impossible burden.

Because the International Monetary Fund is mandated to worry about international financial stability, it is the central institution for international oversight of sovereign debt.

In this volume, the IMF brought together 38 economic and legal experts to explain to a broad audience why governments borrow, how to borrow sustainably, and how to emerge from default.

It is not a training manual but is comprehensive and clearly written so that even ministers of finance and legislators should understand it and civil society should draw on it in campaigns against debt crises.

By S. Ali Abbas (editor), Alex Pienkowski (editor), Kenneth Rogoff (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Sovereign Debt as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The last time global sovereign debt reached the level seen today was at the end of the Second World War, and this shaped a generation of economic policymaking. International institutions were transformed, country policies were often draconian and distortive, and many crises ensued. By the early 1970s, when debt fell back to pre-war levels, the world was radically different. It is likely that changes of a similar magnitude -for better and for worse - will play out
over coming decades. Sovereign Debt: A Guide for Economists and Practitioners is an attempt to build some structure around the issues of sovereign…


Explore my book 😀

Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises

By Barry Herman (editor), Jose Antonio Ocampo (editor), Shari Spiegel (editor)

Book cover of Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises

What is my book about?

Even more than a decade after publication, this book continues to be read as its 20 authors captured well the politics and economics of developing country debt crises since the 1980s, unfortunately made timely again by a new wave of crises today. It contains in-depth studies of the debt crises in Argentina, Ethiopia, and Russia, and how unsustainable debts that governments owed to banks, bondholders, and other governments were (and still are) renegotiated. Those chapters provide an important complement to analytical essays by prominent economic and legal thinkers, and the discussion of international reform proposals that would have done the job better in bringing countries out of crisis if only they had been adopted.

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Book cover of The Bloomsbury Photographs

Maggie Humm Author Of Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Woolfian Gym devotee World-traveller

Maggie's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays.

The Bloomsbury…

The Bloomsbury Photographs

By Maggie Humm,

What is this book about?

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group's key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs

Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are…


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