Quo Vadis, Sefior Brady? The Brady Initiative: A Way Out of the Global Debt Crisis?

This article examines the relation between the global debt crisis and the accumulation crisis of the capitalist system, in both peripheral and core countries. In contrast to the 1950s, since the 1970s despite its hegemony the U.S. has been unable to bear the costs of stabilizing the capitalist world market and has taken a selective approach to the solution of the global debt crisis, as the case of Mexico clearly shows. This article argues further that the U.S. attempts to socialize the loan losses of private creditors through the instrumentalization of multilateral agencies and the Brady Initiative, shifting the costs from private creditors and debtors to civil society. However, this strategy has shown few signs of success, and the creditor banks and the indebted countries are far from solving their global contradictions. In Latin America, after the "lost decade" of the 1980s, the possibility of total collapse and pauperization in the 1990s cannot be dismissed.