history
Few persons, even legal scholars, realize that sovereign bankruptcy has a long history. Far from a pie-in-the-sky scheme conceived in the 1980s by international lawyers such as Christopher Oeschli and economists such as Jeffrey Sachs that later inspired the failed IMF Krueger proposal for a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, the concept of sovereign debt bankruptcy and discharge (write-off) has an ancient and little known history. My new INET working paper sets out this history for the first time.
The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application […]
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