And because they help avert more costly problems, timely investments in infrastructure may be the most powerful debt-reduction strategy of all.
The farm lobby is politically powerful, so debts are rolled over, but new credit is scarce: bank lending to finance this year's harvest totalled only about $7 billion, down from $25 billion in the late 1970s, according to Luiz Hafers, of the Rural Society, a farmers' lobby.
But as Stephanie Black's powerful documentary "Life and Debt" illustrates with an impressive (and depressing) acuity, globalization can have a devastating impact on third world countries.
And so it goes dismally on.Just take the hitNobody yet knows whether the extreme borrowing in the credit boom was a sensible result of the powerful new machinery of debt, or the sort of excess still unwinding in Japan: the lawyers will argue about that.
Mexico's GDP, for instance, fell by 6% in 1995 and Indonesia's by 13% in 1998.Those collapses held powerful lessons: foreign-currency debt was dangerous, the IMF was to be avoided at all costs and prudence demanded the build-up of vast war chests of foreign-exchange reserves.
He grudgingly conceded that a few savvy investors saw the crisis coming, asserting that nearly everyone in the financial services industry had failed to see a dozen powerful forces — from excessive debt levels to trade imbalance — come together in a perfect storm.
DEBT is as powerful a drug as alcohol and nicotine.
Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful figure in Europe's debt crisis, is staying on.
But Mr. Katzenberg insists that his company, with no debt and a powerful track record, has all it needs to thrive.
To patch over the problems, the government is urging banks to bail out ailing, but politically powerful, construction companies by swapping debt for equity and taking other measures.
