New Internationalist NI549, May/June 2024

Debt: Which Way Out?

As more households – and countries – are pushed into unmanageable debt, this magazine explores how we got here, how debt connects us across borders and how debtors can build collective power.

In a global financial system stacked against poorer households and
governments, we ask who is making money from our debt, and who really owes whom?

As the world faces a slow-burning crisis of unsustainable debt, New Internationalist’s May-June Big Story traces the connections between struggling households in the US and communities in Sri Lanka, angry at the lack of transparency in how their government has managed the country’s national debt crisis.

We hear how debtors’ union, the Debt Collective, is pushing to abolish illegitimate debt and the story behind the standoff at the centre of the G20’s mechanism for alleviating national debt crises.

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis writes on why it’s capitalism, not debt itself, that’s the issue and Harold Issac reports from Haiti on how the country’s so-called ‘independence debt’, forced by France and its allies, can be tracked to today’s cycle of violence.

Also in this edition, Cyril Zenda explores why so many Zimbabweans are still landless more than two decades on from Mugabe’s land reforms, Henry Luzzatto calls out Israel’s Gaza greenwash and we ask, what if we abolished billionaires?

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