Here are 74 books that Rethinking Sovereign Debt fans have personally recommended if you like
Rethinking Sovereign Debt.
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As a physicist by education and therefore fundamentally interested in how things work, my early career was spent in secure communications before moving into finance, specifically payments. I helped to found one of the leading consultancies in the field and worked globally for organizations ranging from Visa and AMEX to various governments and multiple Central Banks. I wrote, it turned out, one of the key books in the field, Identity Is The New Money (2014), and subsequently, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (2017), about the history and future of money. The Currency Cold War (2020) was a prescient implication of digital currencies, particularly CBDC.
I see David Greaeber’s book as a landmark in the field. He completely changed my understanding of and views on money’s role in society and its evolution. I had the good fortune to meet David a few times (in fact, I made a podcast with him) and feel like I learned from every conversation.
Until I read David’s book, I had assumed that the Barter theory of money and the double coincidence of wants was the natural and unchallenged explanation for how money came to be and what roles it performed. David’s and subsequent authors' work has shown that this view is simplistic and outdated.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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…
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?
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.
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…
After a life of teaching and writing, I have been reading widely in the literature on the Civil War North to set the stage for my next project, a book on the life and times of my great-grandfather, who has loomed over my imagination since I was a boy during the years of the Civil War Bicentennial. Both a soldier and politician, he emerged as one the most militant of the Radical Republicans in the early years of Reconstruction. What follows is my personal list of very important, very readable, recent books on the Northern experience of the war that I will have by my side as I start writing.
Fighting a war required a lot of money, and David Thomson explains how that money was found. His story is surprising. Previous American wars going back to the Revolution had been funded by great merchants and financiers, but fundraising in the Union drew on a new source, by an unexpected figure.
The notorious financier Jay Cooke would later describe his role in organizing huge sales of U.S. war bonds to the American public as his finest hour. Certainly, there were bonds sold in European markets, especially in Germany, but the bulk of the war finance was based on ordinary Americans buying bonds to support the cause for a little old-age security in years to come.
Thompon’s account shows how the surge of Union sentiment that Goodheart describes as a “Civil War Awakening” was translated into a surge of patriotic popular capitalism that anticipated the American experience in the two world…
How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company, entrusted by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War. How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and buy into, based not just in the full faith and credit of the United States but also in the…
I’ve been studying money since the early 1980s, when my dissertation advisor—the late and great Hyman Minsky—warned me not to do “Genesis”, origins stories of money. But I couldn't resist. I'm one of the founders of Modern Money Theory (MMT), an approach developed over the past three decades that has garnered tens of thousands of followers and earned the hatred of the elite. And, yet, those who know how money really works—or who embrace public policy pursuing the public interest (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and even central bankers—have admitted that government cannot run out of money. I’ve written hundreds of academic papers, more blogs, many books, and given hundreds of interviews presenting the MMT alternative.
This one’s by a member of the home team—a former student, colleague, collaborator, and fellow MMT conspirator.
Kelton was an advisor to Bernie Sanders, served as chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee, and is a frequent guest on all the important media outlets. She explains the basics of MMT and why they are important—especially right now as Congress is hog-tied trying to figure out what to do to prevent Uncle Sam from defaulting as we broach the debt limit.
Read this book and you’ll never again confuse Uncle Sam’s budget with your own. Youcan run out of money! Uncle Sam cannot. Uncle Sam’s budget deficit puts money in yourpocket! His debt is yourasset!
If you are worried about the government’s deficit and debt, take a deep breath, and read this book now.
'Kelton has succeeded in instigating a round of heretical questioning, essential for a post-Covid-19 world, where the pantheon of economic gods will have to be reconfigured' Guardian
'Stephanie Kelton is an indispensable source of moral clarity ... the truths that she teaches about money, debt, and deficits give us the tools we desperately need to build a safe future for all' Naomi Klein
'Game-changing ... Read it!' Mariana Mazzucato
'A rock star in her field' The Times
'This book is going to be influential' Financial Times
'Convincingly overturns conventional wisdom' New York Times
My interest in bureaucratic power and its pervasive control grew out of my social and feminist activity no less than from my critical thinking about State institutions. Combining field research as a social anthropologist with my activism exposed me to the harmful implications of bureaucratic power. I delved into social and gender power relations in contexts like absorption centers with immigrants from Ethiopia, women's empowerment projects in "developing" countries, threatened motherhood in the welfare state, and others. My personal experience as an involved participant enabled me to better understand the ethnocentric and exploiting nature of international development projects, of Israeli "absorbing" agencies, and of child care policies.
I "discovered" Hancock's book by coincidence in the summer of 2000, when I stayed in Oxford.
While working on my book I met a scholar who recommended me the book when he learned about my study. He thought that Hancock's book could offer me some exciting insights. Reading the book was overwhelming for me, as I found out that my "Nepali experience" in the context of a women's development project was not exceptional.
I realized then that my critical analysis gained further evidence, through elaborating on Hancock's numerous examples from other places where the World Bank and Western Capitalist agencies were involved.
Each year some sixty billion dollars are spent on foreign aid throughout the world. Whether in donations to charities such as Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, UNICEF, or the Red Cross, in the form of enormous loans from the World Bank, or as direct payments from one government to another, the money is earmarked for the needy, for relief in natural disasters—floods or famines, earthquakes, or droughts—and for assistance in the development of nations.
The magnitude of generosity from the world’s wealthy nations suggests the possibility of easing, if not eliminating, hunger, misery, and poverty; in truth, however, only a…
I've always been interested in trying to make the world a better place, increasing the well-being of families and nations, and not just in making private profit for myself or for some employer. In working as a consultant on education and development in 22 different countries, many of them poor and developing such as Nepal, Malawi, and Indonesia, I've seen a lot of poverty and inequality, and have also come to see how education, including its effects on fertility rates, health, longevity, the survival of democratic institutions and so forth and especially its financing is at the heart of making lives better, especially for children who are the future of each family and each nation.
I strongly recommend this book because it is clearly written, explains the methods of estimation, and provides an excellent overview of the extensive worldwide research on the returns to education based on earnings.
It certainly influenced me. It had a massive impact on World Bank lending policies in support of economic development in developing countries. It replaced the kinds of Bank physical capital investment policies such as those supporting dam construction, projects that included educating only for a few people on how to operate dams, with education sector-wide loans that support primary and junior secondary education of the labor force.
Some of these dams later washed out, and forests were destroyed in support of development. The book shows how the returns to investment in primary and secondary education are higher in developing countries where the labor force is often nearly illiterate than they are to investing in other higher levels…
Hardback. Jacket a little sunned, worn, with several small nicks along top edge. Boards a little worn at edges only. Previous owner's name label on front endpaper; contents otherwise clean and sound throughout. TPW
In 6th grade I did a report about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which manifested in a career spanning more than 20 years where I’ve worked for NGOs, the State Department, and the United States Agency for International Development to help make the world a better place. I’ve lived in Guatemala, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Jordan, and travelled throughout Sub-Saharan Africa working on conflict prevention, democracy, governance, and human rights. I’m a firm believer that, no matter your profession, everyone can help make the world a better place – and that’s why I wrote my book and why I read the books on my list – to help make this a reality.
This book is like the other side of the coin to Sex and World Peace.
In that book, the authors articulate the connection between gender inequality and global suffering through statistics, whereas Half the Sky describes it in individual stories. It is moving to hear about these women’s suffering, but it is also uplifting to hear how they have overcome.
This book is an excellent resource for understanding how gender equality leads to increasing economic growth while reducing global poverty and inequality. It is an important tool in any ordinary hero’s toolkit.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation—the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. From the bestselling authors of Tightrope,two of our most fiercely moral voices
With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world…
I've been a researcher, educator, and practitioner of domestic violence services for over 15 years, and am extremely passionate about this topic. After having worked in the domestic violence field, I then pursued my PhD to study this problem, which I now continue to research and teach about as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Moravian University. In our ever-globalizing world, I believe it's especially important for us to consider domestic violence from a cross-cultural perspective, and having studied this issue in Latin America and among Latina women in the U.S., I hope to spread that knowledge even further. More than ever, it is important for everyone to gain knowledge on this worldwide problem.
Anthropological literature is one of the best places to look to learn about issues from a cross-cultural perspective, and Dorothy Ayers Counts and Judith Brown are often credited with literally “writing the book” on domestic violence in anthropology.
Likewise, Jacquelyn Campbell is one of the foremost thinkers and systems creators when it comes to domestic violence and health services. Through this book and their earlier edition from 1992, they offered the first compilations of anthropological perspectives on domestic violence. This book demonstrates how different people around the world experience this issue so we can contemplate how it looks and is dealt with across different cultural settings.
This vitally important volume places the problem of wife beating in a broad cultural context in a search for strategies to reform societies, including our own, that are prone to this pernicious form of violence. Based on first hand ethnographic data on more than a dozen societies, including a number in Oceania, this collection explores the social and cultural factors that work either to inhibit or to promote domestic violence against women. The volume also includes a study of abuse among nonhuman primates and a cross-cultural analysis of the legal aspects of wife beating. By presenting counterexamples from other cultures,…
