Being free of debt, whether it be an individual or a nation, is a fantasy. Well, so we have been brainwashed to believe.

In fact we have been:

‘bamboozled’ into allowing a small financial elite to create colossal quantities of private wealth while burdening the world with debt, volatility, crises and rising rates of inequality.

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

Even the IMF admitted in a paper published in June, 2016:

the neoliberal agenda – a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies – rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm

Ann Pettifor tells us that Keynes understood how to protect our economies by avoiding mobile capital which had been encouraged to all our detriment since discarding Keynesian advice. He suggested if we close borders to footloose, international mobile capital, we can avoid the pitfalls all of us know only too well.

Read the definition of capital mobility:

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/capital-mobility

Many high income nations have increased their debt more than developing countries between 2005 and 2015.

Read about countries Statista has revealed to have taken on the burden of high debt by borrowing from China:

https://www.statista.com/chart/29603/chinese-emergency-bailouts/

This shows the more desperate the country, the more likely they are to go to China as a lender of last resort.

Bailout amounts provided by China remained quite low in the 2000s and early 2010s, before shooting up from 2015 onwards, climbing to a total of $100 billion for the two decades. The two most common ways in which these loans work is through a liquidity swap with the Chinese Central Bank – where most of the outstanding balances of around $40 billion were located as of 2021 – or through credit lines from Chinese state-owned banks. Three countries, Venezuela, South Sudan and Ecuador, received prepayments on goods they were to deliver to China.

Financiers in the global financial market make decisions which can cause pain in some part of the world they may not even be familiar with….running our lives from a distance with impunity.

Allowing capital to be fully mobile inhibits the management by government of their own domestic financial market and interest rates if:

lenders in international markets offer higher or lower rates beyond a country’s border, rates that may not be appropriate to economic conditions in-country.

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

Governments must be free to analyse their own nation’s financial position and adjust interest rates and policies accordingly to the benefit of its population.

…..mobile capital’s absolute power derives from its ability to move effortlessly across borders and to lend at the highest rate of interest to institutions and individuals that need finance…….the IMF provides protection…

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

It is therefore imperative to work toward international cooperation and change the system – but we don’t seem inclined to do that these days, and we see populations suffering immensely as a result.