Fans pick 100 books like Sovereign Debt

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 David’s and subsequent authors' work has shown that this view is simplistic and outdated. 

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? 

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?

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.

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… show more.

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.

This book is about the planners who set about devising the rules and institutions of the post-WWII international economic order.

The conventional story is that institutions like the IMF and World Bank were mainly creations of American and British policymakers, and the rules enshrined in those institutions reflect narrowly Anglo-American ideas and interests. But Helleiner’s amazing historical research reveals that officials from countries in the so-called “periphery” of the world economy (like China, India, and Brazil) had much more influence in these negotiations than we realized.

Their courageous efforts ensured that some of their developmental ideas (aimed at reducing the massive global wealth and power imbalances) were, in fact, incorporated into the international rules that shaped the postwar economic order. The politics of economic ideas come to life in this book. 

Financial crises are not only catastrophic because of their devastating economic consequences. They also unleash radical political forces undermining the foundations of our free and open society. Widely praised for his work on Germany in the interwar years, Harold James is the best historian to describe the vicious circle of crisis, radicalization, and national isolation in the 1930s and to discuss the question: can it happen again?

Yes, this is the same Graham Hancock who now writes contrarian archeological tomes. I conducted some of my PhD fieldwork in the same area of Somalia that he visited as a reporter, and I was there not long after he was in the 1980s.

This was the first book I came across that explained why almost every development project I’d encountered when traveling around Africa seemed to be such a waste, or worse. Next to no one at the time was reporting on the corruption generated by ‘development’ or the extent to which aid was an industry. Hancock nailed it.  

“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

In 2005, Tony Blair told his party that a new, free-market, globalized form of capitalism was inevitable. Filipino theorist, activists and later politician Walden Bello begged to differ. He believed globalization was a political choice, and one that suited Western elites and their multinational corporations, at the expense of the mass of humanity.

In Deglobalization, Bello sets out to show how things could be different, imagining a more diverse international economy centred on the principle of being as democratic as possible.