Systemic debt persistence: How neoliberal austerity and financialisation sustain perpetual fiscal crises globally
Original framing: “Forget 'fiscal discipline,' record government debt is here to stay - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Debt crises are not anomalies but recurring features of capitalism, from the 19th-century Latin American defaults to the 1980s IMF structural adjustment programs that devastated African and Latin economies. The post-WWII Bretton Woods system was designed to prevent debt crises, but neoliberal deregulation in the 1970s–80s reversed this, creating the conditions for today’s perpetual debt cycles. Historical parallels show how debt is weaponised to justify privatisation, austerity, and the transfer of public wealth to private hands.
The 'record debt' narrative is a symptom of a financialised economy where public funds are siphoned into private hands through interest payments, tax evasion, and austerity-induced crises.
This system is not an accident but a designed feature of neoliberal capitalism, where debt serves as a disciplinary tool against the poor while enriching elites—echoing colonial extraction and racial capitalism. Indigenous and Global South traditions offer radical alternatives, from debt jubilees to communal ownership, but these are erased by Western economic dogma. The trickster’s lens reveals the absurdity of 'fiscal discipline' in a world where billionaires pay lower tax rates than nurses, while the future demands we break debt’s grip through public banking, tax justice, and cooperative economies. The path forward requires dismantling the power structures that profit from perpetual debt, not 'disciplining' the victims of this system.