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Debt

Senegal On The Edge Of Collapse

Senegal entered 2026 in the grip of a growing debt crisis that seems insurmountable. After the government of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye took power in April 2024, it became clear that his predecessor, Macky Sall (who held office from 2012 to 2024), had concealed enormous liabilities – including hidden loans equivalent to 25.3 percent of GDP – from the Senegalese people and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These liabilities expose a structural contradiction: a development model subordinated to external finance has clear limits. Senegal can no longer continue along this path.

The Next Financial Shock To Come From Trump’s War With Iran

Let’s set the scene. The U.S. government is staring down a projected $1.9 trillion deficit for this fiscal year, with the total national debt now pushing $39 trillion. Simultaneously, the expanding war in Iran and the subsequent crisis in the Strait of Hormuz have fractured global energy supply chains, driving Brent crude to $119 a barrel and sparking a massive inflationary shock. By any standard metric of sovereign risk, a state that is rapidly accelerating its debt issuance while engaging in a war of choice that is throttling the worldwide supply of oil should be facing the possibility of having its bonds repriced.

What Detroit Can Learn From Other Cities’ Home Repair Loan Programs

After 10 years and just $16.7 million in repairs — a sliver of what’s needed to fix Detroit’s aging homes — a city-backed home repair loan program is shut down for an overhaul. That means one fewer option for homeowners desperate to fix leaky roofs and ancient plumbing — even as Mayor Mary Sheffield’s new administration said it plans to prioritize home repair. A revamped loan program could play a key role in helping the tens of thousands of Detroiters who live in substandard housing. Private credit is one of the few funding sources with the potential scale to meet residents’ profound needs — if city leaders move aggressively to make loans more accessible.

Ecological Accounting’s Debt-Climate Nexus

The IF20 Religion and Environment Working Group’s 2025 policy brief frames the debt–climate nexus as an existential constraint on low-resource countries, where debt servicing displaces public services and climate response. Building from a proposed UN-centered debt framework, this article focuses on precautionary dangers inside SDG or national accounting instruments, since swaps and valuation-based relief can become predatory when they shift territorial and resource decision-making through external monitoring and data custody.

How To Challenge Wage Garnishment For Defaulted Student Loans

For the first time since the onset of COVID-19, the Trump administration is set to garnish U.S. workers’ wages for defaulted student loans. The Department of Education has announced that beginning this week it will send at least 1,000 borrowers a notice of intent to garnish wages, sending additional notices every month as it expands its efforts to forcibly collect money from millions of borrowers in default. This is a cruel, harsh policy that the Trump administration does not have to implement — and it shouldn’t.

Economists Call For The Suspension Of Sri Lanka’s Debt

The Institute of Political Economy (IPE), Sri Lanka and the UK-based Debt Justice issued a joint statement demanding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suspend Sri Lanka’s debt repayment to help it tackle its prolonged economic crisis compounded by Cyclone Ditwah. The statement, signed by over 120 well-known economists from across the world including Jayati Ghosh and Utsa Patnaik from India, Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and French economist Thomas Piketty, asks the IMF to prioritize the welfare of people and their development over financial obligations to external creditors.

Compound Interest Is Devouring The Federal Budget

Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying that compound interest is “the most powerful force in the universe.” The quote is probably apocryphal, but it reflects a mathematical truth. Interest on earlier interest grows exponentially, outrunning the linear growth of revenue and eventually consuming everything. That is where the United States now stands. The government does pay the interest on its debt every year, but it is having to pay it with borrowed money. The interest curve is rising exponentially, while the tax base is not.

America Didn’t Have A Boom This Black Friday

Black Friday set another record this year. Reporters treated it as proof that Americans still have strength in their wallets and that the economy has life in it. The president called it the “Trump Bump.” The headlines bragged about an eleven point eight billion dollar day and analysts lined up to praise the numbers. None of it holds up once you look at how people paid for those purchases and how much strain sits underneath those sales. A record weekend in a hollowed out economy is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of how far people will push themselves to give their kids one normal holiday in a year that left them with nothing extra. The record spending didn’t come from rising wages or cash that families finally had on hand.

The Deficit Is Not An Economic Problem; It’s A Political Weapon

Mark Carney’s long-anticipated investment-austerity budget has finally been tabled before Parliament and it’s set to raise the deficit to $78 billion. While the details of the budget will be debated over the coming weeks, the big picture is that the prime minister delivered on his promises: expanded defence and infrastructure spending “offset” by more than $50 billion in cuts and other savings. For months Carney has been laying the groundwork for these moves, making high-profile statements about Canada’s supposed spending problem and promising to discipline government workers in order to restore fiscal sanity.

How A Fed Overhaul Could Eliminate The Federal Debt Crisis

There has been considerable discussion in recent years about reforming, modifying, or even abolishing the Federal Reserve. Proposals range from ending its independence, to integrating its functions into the U.S. Treasury Department, to dismantling it and returning monetary policy to direct congressional or Treasury oversight.  The Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act (H.R. 1846 and S. 869, 119th Congress, 2025-2026), introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie in the House and Sen. Mike Lee in the Senate on March 4, 2025, calls for abolishing the Fed’s Board of Governors and regional banks within one year of enactment, liquidating Fed assets and transferring net proceeds to the Treasury.

How The World Can Free Itself From US Financial Colonialism

We are all living in a time of great change. There are massive geopolitical shifts happening in the world today, and we see the rise of new organizations like BRICs, which now represents more than 50% of the global population. The 20 countries of the extended BRICS+ now also make up more than 40% of world GDP, when measured at purchasing power parity (PPP). These new Global South-led organizations like BRICS represent the Global Majority. But there’s still a problem, which is that the most powerful international organizations today are largely dominated by the United States and the Western powers. This includes institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. These are organizations where the U.S. is the only country on Earth that has veto power.

Can The Poorer Nations Build A New Architecture For Development And Sovereignty?

A horrifying statistic hovers over the poorer nations: 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments for public debt than on education or health. In 2024, according to a new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), global public debt reached $102 trillion – a third of which is held by developing countries. The impact on these countries is especially severe: credit markets charge poorer nations far higher interest rates than they do richer nations, making debt servicing payments proportionately higher for the Global South.

Financing For Development Forum Plants The Seeds Of Debtor Unity

UN Member States adopted the ‘Compromiso de Sevilla’ at the Fourth Financing for Development Forum (FfD4) which concluded July 3– the culmination of months of contentious negotiations that pitted wealthy nations against the developing world in competing visions for reform of the global economic architecture. The wide-ranging outcome document will be met with both fanfare — from the host countries and UN officials keen to portray the process as a success — and criticism — from civil society groups lamenting the watering down of material commitments into so many toothless words.

The International Monetary Fund Underdevelops Africa

At the start of 2025, Sudan registered an alarming debt-to-GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ratio of 252%. This means that the country’s total public debt is 2.5 times the size of its entire annual economic output. It is not hard to understand why Sudan is in such dire straits: as we outlined in last week’s newsletter, the country has been engulfed in a conflict for decades, which has severely disrupted any possibility of economic growth and financial stability. Yet, in a way, Sudan – one of the richest countries in terms of resources but poorest in terms of household income and wealth – is also representative of what has been happening on the African continent.

President Trump’s Proposal To Eliminate Income Taxes: Can It Be Done?

In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes. The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.
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