Over the last ten years Greece has been a prime example of how a country and a people can be deprived of their liberty through clearly illegitimate debt. Since the 19th century, from Latin America to China, Haiti, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire public debt has been used as a coercive force to impose domination and pillage (Toussaint, 2017). Visibly, it is the combination of debt and free trade that constitute the fundamental factors subordinating whole economies as from the 19th century. Local elites allied themselves with big financial powers in order to subject their own countries and peoples permanently to methods of power that transfer wealth towards local and foreign creditors.
Contrary to commonplace ideas, it is generally not the indebted weaker countries that are the cause of sovereign debt crises. These crises break out first in the biggest capitalist countries or are the result of their unilateral decisions that produce effects of great magnitude in the indebted countries. It is not so-called “excessive” public spending that builds up unsustainable debt levels, but rather the conditions imposed by local and foreign creditors. Real interest rates are abusively high and so are bankers’ commissions. The indebted countries unable to keep up with repayments have to continually find new loans to repay old loans. In the past, when that became impossible, the great powers had licence to resort to military action to ensure they were repaid.