Media Storm - Global debt crisis: How bankers and billionaires keep countries poor

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Sri Lanka, Ukraine, South Sudan, Haiti, Greece, Zambia, The Latin America Lost Decade… prepare yourselves for a lesson in history . And in geography. And in (ew) economics! Today, we’re talking about debt. You might not know it, but the world is in a spiralling global debt crisis. On average, low-income countries spend about a fifth of their entire national budget paying off foreign debt. To put that number into perspective, in 2014, it was just 5%. 3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than education or health. And who are these interest payments going to? Bankers, billionaires, and the world’s wealthiest countries — incidentally, often former colonisers. This is not the story we get told in the media. So to tell us the first-hand human impact of global debt – which is inextricably linked to the climate crisis – we are joined by one of Zambia’s most prominent debt cancellation and climate activists, Precious Kolbwana. Plus, spitting cold hard facts, Lead Economist at the NGO CAFOD, Maria Finnerty. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign the Fair Trade petition here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, hello, hello. We've got a lot to get through today. We do. So no time for nonsense. Oh, I love nonsense. I have one piece of nonsense to share because it's such important nonsense. That doesn't sound like nonsense at all. Nonsense is us rambling about like, I don't know.

Persian New Year. Oh my God. Yes, yes. Now is Mubarak, everybody. Well, I mean, I was in Prague on a Hindu, so I wouldn't say I was exactly doing my typical New Year celebrations. But it is the New Year. Okay, enough nonsense.

Get onto your thing. Okay, okay. I hope all of our listeners heard our modern slavery episode, just two weeks ago. Very, very timely if you're in the UK, the government is now considering a human rights and environmental due diligence law. That would step up our regulation kind of on a part of the EU's where companies would actually be forced to do something about things like child forced labour in their supply chain. So Fair Trade has a petition going. We'll put a link in the show notes. And if you sign it, it will just pressure the government to push that bill through. On with the show. So today's

deep dive, it's a topic you don't really want to get too deep into. It's debt. Not personal debt, national debt. You might not know it, but the world is facing a spiraling global debt crisis. On average, low-income countries spend about a fifth of their entire national budget, paying off foreign debt. To put that number into perspective, in 2014, it was 5%, not 20%. So 3 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on education or health. And who are those payments going to? Bankers, billionaires and the world's wealthiest countries. Incidentally, often those countries former colonizers.

Oof, okay, this definitely feels like a media storm story, an underreported, misunderstood, and let's face it, probably quite racist issue. But economics is So just break it down for us at a basic level. Starting with national debt. What does that mean? National debt, also known as sovereign debt, is the money borrowed by a country's government

to fund public spending when they can't raise enough money through taxes. So they can borrow internally from local banks or investors or they can borrow externally from foreign governments or financial institutions. And it's important to say that not all debt is exploited. if well designed and well managed, debt can be a useful tool that allows countries to invest in people and grow their economies. But when the terms of debt are unfair and payments are unmanageable, countries are forced to make impossible choices to pay them off. Choices like what? Like stop funding health or education.

Like exploit natural resources at a massive climate cost for short-term gain. Or like taking out more loans with even worse term. and getting stuck in a cycle of cutbacks and hardships instead of recovery. And meanwhile, someone's getting rich off it. That sounds like the Gen Z protests we've seen in recent years, which we've talked about on Media Storm, where the debt crisis has played a big role in them in the protests in Kenya or Sri Lanka, for example. Yeah, those are exactly really good examples. Sri Lanka faced a dramatic economic collapse when COVID-shut.

down the tourist trade. But this followed years of borrowing at high interest rates. So now the country couldn't pay its debt. There were fuel shortages, blackouts, food prices soared and that led to mass protests that caused the president Rajapaska to flee in July 22. So the new administration had to deal with the debt. They negotiated a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. And they negotiated to restructure their debt with their credit. With their creditors which included China, India and Japan. Debt restructuring means renegotiating the terms of the loan. For example, reducing interest rates or extending the repayment timeline. But bailouts from the IMF and restructurings come with strict terms and often a high human cost. In Sri Lanka's case,

it has meant privatising state-owned enterprises, essentially selling off a country's resources to private companies based abroad. It has meant forgetting national. Development Goals, freezing public sector hiring, canceling infrastructure projects in transport and irrigation, shutting off funding for health and education. And as a result, civil society groups estimate 6.3 million people in Sri Lanka are now skipping meals. But if you were to go by headline narratives, you'd think Sri Lanka was currently seeing an economic recovery. I swear I've read about their recovery. By traditional metrics, yeah, that's true. It's just that the price of macroeconomic stability is massive human suffering. The real question should be who is recovering

because very often it's the lenders recovering their money. I think I do need some more real life examples to wrap my head around all of this. Greece is the really big debt crisis that I remember from growing up. How does that fit into this story? So yes, in 2009, as the world was feeling the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, Greece was hit, particularly. hard. We might remember, by the way, that this crisis was caused largely by US banks and lenders. But Greece was hit particularly hard because it had borrowed lots of money, largely from banks in Germany, France and the UK. So by 2010, international lenders, the EU and the IMF, they stepped in with bailout loans to make sure that those banks could recover their original money

and didn't plunge into even worse financial crisis. But there was a catch. To receive the money, Greece had to implement austerity, a policy of cutting public spending. That meant slashing pensions, reducing wages, cutting healthcare. Unemployment in Greece soared to 25%. Now here's the twist. A lot of that bailout money didn't even stay in Greece. It went straight into European banks to pay off those loans. So while Greek citizens endured deep hardships, large financial institutions who had played a huge role in causing the crisis, crisis, they were shielded from the losses. Okay, I'm with you, and that sucks. Now, another of the most significant historical examples was the Latin American debt crisis.

The 1980s are referred to in this area as the lost decade. So this crisis followed years of borrowing in the 1970s, and then rising interest rates throughout the 1980s. We'll talk about why a lot of these things are not the country's own fault. But as with Sri Lanka, in the case of the Latin American debt crisis, the I-A-I-AIDS, the I-A-A-Rexempties, the IMF stepped in with restructuring programs. And to access these, countries had to impose austerity on their own people. They had to privatise state-owned industries and sell them off to foreign buyers and open their markets to global trade.

So poverty rose, wages fell, public services deteriorated, but international markets benefited and banks gradually got their money back. Handing national assets to foreigners, giving up policy or autonomy, it's all starting to sound, dare I say it, rather colonial. You can say it, Helena, but the media sure as hell won't. Look, you're right. Let's take a little look at history. During colonialism, wealthy countries secured power over poorer ones using military force. But in the 20th century, techniques shifted. Direct control through military means often became indirect control through economic means. Scholars call this neo-colonialism. But economic control was actually very easy to impose on former colonies.

Why? Because colonial economies had been designed for extraction. Under empires like the British or the French, colonies exported raw materials like copper or cocoa or cotton, and then they had to import finished goods from the industrial motherlands. Local industries were suppressed. So this has created economies in those countries that are very dependent on a few exports and very vulnerable to price swings. This is one reason why former colonialised states are more likely to plunge into debt crisis

and that in turn becomes an excuse for even more foreign power to be imposed over their economies. So inequality reproduces itself. Exactly. And even more so, former colonies are likely to have actually started off in debt because when they became independent they inherited these narrow economies, they didn't really have many wealthy populations who they could tax,

so they had to borrow heavily to develop their own local infrastructures and industries. So today we have a debt crisis, and we don't see it as part of colonial history. We're often told it exists because certain countries are just really bad at managing their own economies. Oh yeah, I've heard that. So can you give me an example of a colony that started off in debt and is still living with those consequences? Probably the starkest example that comes to my mind is Haiti. Haiti is a particularly horrifying example

because as a colony, the country was enslaved. And then when it fought and earned its own independence through slave revolts, it was made to pay a massive indemnity to former slave owners. And in order to pay their slave owners off, it was forced to borrow from the country that enslaved it, France. This locked it into a centuries-long debt burden. And today, that is still playing out where you have armed gangs controlling the country

causing massive displacement and massive food insecurity. So look, while debt can be a helpful tool, the reality is in our post-colonial world, it often simply represents a repeat of history and the lessons we refuse to learn. cynically, I don't think this is the world failing to learn the lessons of history. I think it's the powerful implementing the lessons of history, just not the lessons that you or I would hope for. Sadly, it's hard to argue with that. I don't think that the global debt crisis is an accident.

It arises from a deeply unequal financial system built by powerful nations to extract wealth and keep less powerful countries compliant. And the thing is today, it's not just wealthy countries. profiting. It's billionaire financiers. Ever heard of Vulture funds? Unfortunately, yes. And with the connotations of Vulture, maybe listeners can guess what you're about to say. Vulture funds are a type of hedge fund that look out for countries struggling to pay their debts. When this happens, they buy up the debt at rock bottom prices and then threaten to sue if not paid back in full. Right now, this is happening to Ukraine. In December, Ukraine was forced to agree to pay $3.7 billion to private creditors,

including hedge funds. Their original debt was $2.6 billion. So these institutions profited a billion from a wartime economy. Another example is Zambia. And I bring this up because one of our guests today is from Zambia. And she's living with the consequences of what happened there. Zambia gained independence from the British Empire in 1964. Through the 70s and 80s, it borrowed a lot, and its economy was largely dependent on copper exports. Remember how we talked about how post-colonial economies are often very, very dependent on a single export?

Well, in the 1990s, the value of copper collapsed. This was nothing to do with Zambia. It was caused by corrupt practice by wealthy foreign corporations and a highly monopolized market. But Zambia fell into a debt crisis that it couldn't pay off. So once again, the IMF stepped in demanding spending cuts and privatization, but others stepped in too. The so-called vulture funds, private foreign investment firms, like BlackRock, bought Zambia's distressed debt at a steep discount for pennies on the dollar. And then they sued for the whole thing.

And how did they do that? they used foreign courts to secure their profits while people in Zambia starved. These vulture funds are often much worse creditors than other countries' government. Because when a country defaults on its debt, that means that it can't pay it. It often restructures it like we talked about. They renegotiate more favourable terms. But private hedge funds refuse to restructure. They sue for the whole amount.

That is horrifying. How is that allowed? Well, that is the thing. is allowed. Most international bonds are governed by the laws of places like New York or London, global financial hubs with systems that frankly put financial interests over human ones. So Vulture funds file lawsuits there, demanding full repayments plus interest plus legal penalties. And it's not even corruption. It's how the system is designed. Courts in places like New York and London prioritize contract law to humanitarian law.

So countries can't come back and say, oh, but if we pay this, thousands of our people will die. That's just not accepted in those courts. This is just so not the story we get from our media. Right? So today, we'll ask, what are the human stories that aren't getting across? How do Western economic biases infiltrate financial world news?

How does the debt crisis tie into other major headlines like the climate crisis or international aid cuts. And how do we fix this mess? Government borrowing is the biggest issue in finance today. Governments around the world are addicted to debt. Let's face it, the world is addicted to debt. The sovereign debt levels globally have just grown exponential. It's politically impossible to solve. We've started to take it as so normal now. The music stops when you get a major crisis. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that's Starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helen Wardia.

And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's Media Storm. Global Debt Crisis. How Bankers and Billionaires Keep Poor Countries Poor. Welcome to Media Storm. Our first guest is head of the Citizens Network for Community Development, Zambia,

a non-governmental organization focused on promoting youth and community participation in development. She's one of Zambia's most prominent debt cancellation and climate activists raising awareness of how these issues intersect based on her own experience when flash flooding hit her region and her family home was swept away. There are some slight connection issues so just bear with us on the audio front. We're very, very lucky to have her with us. Welcome to Media Storm,

precious Colboana. Thank you so much for the welcome at Tudor. Our second guest is a development economist and expert on the systemic root causes of global poverty and inequality. As lead economist at UK-based NGO CAFOD, she advocates for action to address the debt crisis that is currently trapping more than 50 countries across the global south in cycles of poverty and debt distress. A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Maria Finity. Hi, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. So just a little outline to today's episode, we'll start by understanding the global debt crises through our guests' respective experiences. On one hand, as an economist and on the other is someone living on the front lines of the fallout.

After the break, we will look at misleading and colonial narratives that colour Western media coverage about foreign debt and how we can all handle the whole thing a lot better. Maria, and the premise of this episode is that debt can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, and in its current form, it's very often doing more harm than good. Can you just explain to us why that is? In the context of foreign debt, what does a fair loan look like? what does an exploitative one look like? For low-income countries, debt costs have two parts.

So you've got the principal amount, which is the amount that they originally borrowed. And then you have the interest that the lender charges, which is additional to the original amount. Now, the problem today in the world isn't the original amount that countries have borrowed. If it was just a question of countries paying back what they borrowed in the first place,

we wouldn't have a global debt crisis. The problem is the extortion, interest rates that low-income countries are being charged. As a result of these extremely high rates, the current situation is completely unsustainable. So 3.4 billion people, that's half of the people on this planet, live in countries where their government spend more on interest payments on their debts than they do on health or education or even climate action. So not even on repaying what they borrowed in the first place, but on interest alone, they're spending more than they do on health or education. So at this point, debt burdens are so high. A lot of countries are stuck in the

cycle of borrowing more just to service their existing debts. So the money is going into the country and then straight back out to profitable foreign lenders. Ordinary people in these countries aren't even seeing any of this money. So the problem isn't debt per se. It's high interest debt and it's the system that governs this high interest debt. And I just want to briefly say what's so unfair about the system. So under a fair debt system, lenders might charge high interest rates because they're making a risky loan and they charge more on the basis that they might not get paid back. The issue is that under the current system, lenders are allowed to charge extortionately high interest rates on the grounds that they might not get paid back in full and then insist on getting paid back in full every time.

How? Because we let them. And when I say we, I mean us in the UK. The UK, you know, isn't a superpower in the way that it once was. We all know that. But it remains a financial superpower because of the roles of the city of London and British overseas territories at the centre of the global financial system. And this is a kind of bizarre hangover from the British Empire in many ways. I'll just illustrate this quickly with an example. So last year, South Sudan was ordered by the UK High Court to pay $657 million to a for-profit. Bank. So that's one of the most fragile and conflict-affected states in the world, in which nearly 70% of the general population are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, being ordered by a UK court to pay nearly half of its government's annual revenue to a for-profit bank. I mean, imagine what it would mean if Rachel Reeves tomorrow was ordered to pay half of the UK's annual revenue to a for-profit bank. It would be the collapse of the NHS, public services. And imagine how much worse this is for a country facing humanitarian crisis and civil war. It's just unthinkable.

The fact is that the UK government could change this tomorrow if they wanted to. It would not cost the treasury a single penny of taxpayers' money and yet they're choosing not to. Wow. Wow, Maria, thank you so much for such a comprehensive overview. And you know, you can just tell the passion in your voice. I'm angry. I understand. Let's look a bit more about how the consequences of this debt crisis materialise in day-to-day life. Precious, in our introduction, we learnt about Zambia's debt crisis.

Can you tell us what real-life impact it had on your communities? Zambia's debt crisis has had very visible everyday consequences. Less money goes into public services. That means unfunded hospital shortages of medicine, over crowded classrooms. We don't have access to clean water. So we don't have those opportunities and we have fewer economic opportunities. You often point out in your campaigning pressures that women and girls are the first to be negatively affected in these contexts. Can you just explain how that is? Women and girls tend to carry the burden. When systems start to fail, when health care becomes less accessible, women often take on unpaid caregiving laws. When families struggles, financial girls are more likely to be pulled out of schools. And because we don't have food on the table, girls are being married or just to support household income. So the crisis depends on existing equality. Can I also just ask you if you're happy to share about how your family specifically has been very, very heavily affected by the intersection of the debt crisis and the climate crisis?

Actually, it feels so strange when I'm talking about these issues of dates and climate because in my own family, we have felt this strain through lazy living costs and reduced access to things that used to feel stable. like constant electricity, affordable food. We don't have access to healthcare. And also, our house of my father was swept away through the floods in 2023. My father had to move from our ancestral land. We had to move from there. They had to go to another place because of the floods.

And we are experiencing 24 hours of load shedding because of the droughts that we face in 2023 to 2024. So this has been so difficult for my family and I to think about why we are facing these issues because of debt in our country. Thank you so much, precious. Your story really clearly shows how debt intersects with the climate crisis. Maria, you touched on it, but could you expand on that for us? How damaging is the debt crisis to climate efforts?

Yeah. I'd go so far as to say, if we don't tackle the debt crisis, we simply will not be able to meet the challenges of the climate crisis, period. So firstly, borrowing to address the damage done by the climate crisis is a huge cause of the debt crisis we're seeing today already. Countries are facing these mounting debt burdens because they're having to borrow to address the damage done by a crisis that they did not create. and it's only going to get worse as extreme weather events become more frequent. So it's kind of a driver of the debt crisis. Secondly, huge debt costs mean that there's no money left for countries to invest in green industrial policy preventing the climate crisis from escalating either.

So the two crises are really reinforcing each other. And then finally, and the piece that in some ways I kind of find most shocking, and we don't talk about very much, a lot of countries are actually being compelled by their lenders to continue to extract fossil fuels and then hand them over to their lenders in payment of their debts. So not only are they being compelled to continue to extract fossil fuels, which is driving the climate crisis that they're suffering from, but, you know, the people in those countries are not even seeing any of the profits from those fossil fuels. They're being handed over to multinational corporations like Glencore, which is also based in the

UK in payment of historic debts. So on multiple levels, the debt crisis is catastrophic in terms of climate. Wow. I just want to share some numbers I came across to explain to listeners how insanely illogical this climate debt system is. Analysis from the International Institute for Environment and Development found that in 2023, the 59 countries that represent the world's least developed countries and small island developing states, paid 28 billion pounds to service their debt, but received only 24 billion pounds in climate finance. So essentially, they are paying back more in debts than all of the so-called aid that they receive to fix the climate crisis in the first place. Precious.

How do you feel about wealthy countries calling financial support for the climate crisis aid, while they're also profiting from climate crisis, aid while they're also profiting from climate loans and they disproportionately caused the climate crisis in the first place. It's frustrating because it doesn't reflect the full picture. Many of the countries most affected by climate change contributed the least to causing it. Calling its aid can feel misleading when they are still profiting from those same financial of those, there's a fairness issue here that needs to be acknowledged. Very frustrating, yes. It might be worth pointing out as well that the situation just described was before a massive wave of aid cuts that have hit the global south in just the last couple of years. Everyone's familiar with

Donald Trump slashing US aid, but it's been true in many countries. Here in the UK, we slashed our aid budget last year by 40% from 0.5 to 0.3% of growth. national income or GNI. We did that to pay, we said, for defence spending increases. But this came on top of a COVID-era cut from 0.7% to 0.5%. Experts said that a result of these was like overnight, 2.9 million children lost funding for school. 12 million people lost access to clean water. An estimated 600,000 more people died from preventable diseases. Maria, how do aid cuts influence the debt crisis? I think it's important to think about net flows. So, you know, where is money flowing from and two? In the context of the aid cuts,

it's really important that we acknowledge why countries are so reliant on aid in the first place, right? And it's because we have these global financial structures that are extracting more from low-income countries than they put in. With the aid cuts, those reverse financial flows are going to get worse. But ultimately, the root causes of those reverse financials, flows out of where the money's needed most and towards where it's needed least, which is, you know, multi-trillion dollar hedge funds. Ultimately, that's created by systemic issues. And just to kind of give you a sense of the scale, so the UK's aid budget now is about £9 billion. Private banks hedge funds have profited more than 141 billion pounds, more than they lent to low-income

countries in the last few years. And the average African country was, spending 50 times more, 50 times more, on foreign debt servicing costs than it received in UK aid, even before these sweeping cuts. So the level of impact that Britain could have on the world stage by taking this crisis seriously and holding our private lenders to account would be enormous. And in the wake of the government claiming that there's no money for aid, there's really no excuse for them not to be taking ambitious action on debt that doesn't cost them a penny. I think it's just outrageous we even call it aid hearing that that net comparison. Yeah. The nerve to call that aid.

I mean, precious, you know, we know that much of Zambia's external debt is held by BlackRock. That's a financial corporation headquartered here in the UK. How does that make you feel? It's difficult knowing that decision made in global financial centres have such a direct impact on people's daily lives here. It can feel distant and impenational. There is a sense that, communities most affected don't have a seat at the table where these decisions are made, which rises questions about accountability and fairness. It's very difficult for us to think that these external dates are held by Blacklock.

They should cancel our date so that we can have access to clean water. We can have medicines in our hospitals. we can have good quality education for our children. These issues, they are so dear to our hearts. So if someone is listening out there, debt and climate they are interlinked. Without money, we can't fight poverty. Without money, we can't fight climate change.

Coming up, we'll look at why the media hasn't raised the alarm about this. But first, let's take a quick break. Welcome back to MediaStorm. We've talked through individual experiences and perspectives of the global debt crisis. Now, let's look at the perspectives dominating Western media. Precious, what do you think of how Western news outlets cover the global debt crisis? Coverage often feels incomplete. It tends to focus on numbers, markets and government decisions, but not enough on the human impact.

The lived experience of people dealing with the consequences are often missing. That can make the crisis seem abstract when in reality it affects real lives in very direct ways. And Maria, same question to you. Where do you think the key issues in the coverage are? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the main issue is that there is no coverage for the most part. You know, this is a huge issue that's directly affecting more than half of the people on this planet. And most of us are just blissfully unaware of it. people are dying every day as a result of unjust debt, and yet it's not kind of deemed worthy of covering. And I think another thing that we're quite unaware of in the UK is our role in

all of this. As I said, Britain is a global financial centre, and unfortunately, a key enabler, probably the biggest enabler of any country of the global financial system that is extracting wealth and resources from low-income countries and handing them over to profitable, multinational corporations and financial firms. And it's not just debt, you know, the city of London and British overseas territories, which often function as tax havens. I'm thinking about places like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, etc., facilitate a third of all global tax abuse, and all countries lose out from this.

You know, the UK loses out from this. If we tackled this, we would have more money to invest in the NHS. But low-income countries lose out at five times the rate, because they don't have the kind of robust tax structures that we have in wealthier countries. And British overseas territories are also facilitating more than half of illicit financial flows globally. So this is dirty money being made from corruption, drug and weapons trafficking and so on. There's being hidden offshore in British crown dependencies. And it's the poorest people in the world who are suffering as a result of this.

Africa has hemorrhaged, I think, more than $1.7 trillion, dollars, trillion dollars in illicit financial flows over the past 50 years. We're just not told about our role in enabling all of this. So I think the media has a responsibility to educate us about our country's role in this. Completely agree because a huge issue we often identify media storm is that the news lacks context. And clickbait and word counts and time pressures often mean that crucial context in articles is sacrificed. Articles failed to join the dots between stories on different pages between healthcare, education, the climate crisis, global financial news.

Readers also miss out on historical context like colonialism. Most countries facing debt crises today are former colonies. Like, hello, it's so obvious. Precious, to what extent is the modern global debt system, a continuation of older economic hierarchies established under empires like the British Empire? They are definitely parallels. Many countries facing debt challenges today

are working within systems that were sharp during colonial periods. The power dynamics haven't fully shifted. Decisions are still often made outside the countries, most affected. So well, the context has changed the structure inner qualities remain. When I read about foreign debt, the phrases that sort of jump out at me are things like they've mismanaged the economy, they've overspent. Maria, when we read about debt crises in the news and we're told that these countries have mismanaged their economies, how accurate is that

explanation and what does it leave out? I think one of the things that leaves out comes back to your last question about the historic context. A lot of these countries were born with debt. You know, they inherit inherited debts from their colonial oppressors, and they've been trapped in cycles of debt ever since. So that context is often missing. But I mean, to come back to your point on mismanagement and overspending and corruption, these are really important issues that have to be addressed. But I would argue that it's the current system that's enabling this corruption and mismanagement, and the reforms that activists and ordinary people across the Global South are calling for would actually help address this and help prevent corruption. You know, we're not called

We're calling for one-off debt relief packages for corrupt governments. We're calling for a fairer system that would prevent corruption from happening at scale in the first place. Can you just explain that? How does debt encourage corruption? Yeah, absolutely. So under the current system, a lot of the financial firms that are doing this lending operate in what's called the shadow banking sector. We don't even know their names.

That's not even public. So the level of transparency is appalling. And I mean, when I say the current system is broken, that's almost a stretch because part of the problem is that there isn't really a system. There's no independent global court to make fair and impartial judgments about debt. There's no transparency or public register of debts, which makes it super difficult for citizens to hold their governments to account. So all of this means it's very easy for corrupt governments to take on debts, knowing that they will never face an independent court. and in many cases, they'll be effectively bailed out by an organisation like the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, whose conditions will ensure that actually it's innocent people living in poverty who pay the price, not elites,

because with an IMF bailout package comes conditions, and those conditions are normally austerity. So the lenders who made the risky loans are bailed out. The government who made the decisions doesn't have to face the consequence of their actions. And in exchange, you'll cut your public spending to the bones. spoken to activists in Suriname who have said that the lights are literally being turned out on the poorest communities in their country because the IMF has requested that the government cut electricity subsidies for the poorest rural communities in exchange for bailout packages. So it always ends up being the poorest and most vulnerable who pay the price and not the elites

who were responsible for the mismanagement in the first place. I'm thinking about something that pressure said, which is that the media talks about the global debt crisis in abstract and highly technical ways. But listening to both of you, economics is not abstract. It affects everybody. So it should be talked about in a way that everybody can understand. But people find economics very, very inaccessible. And I suppose that one thing that would help is centering, as Precious said, the human realities in financial news.

Where is the lived experience? And I wonder, Precious, if you could speak. directly to policymakers or creditors in places like London or New York, what would you want them to understand about the human impact of their decisions? Thank you so much for this chance. I'll be waiting for this. I'm very excited even to go to London to talk about this outside the Black Rock. I'll be in London in April to talk about dates and climate crisis in my community here in Zambia. how women and girls are being affected outside BlackRock office.

I would want them to understand that these decisions are not just financial. They are human. Behind every repayment is a trade-off that affects healthcare, education and life rewards. It is important to consider not just whether a country can repay, but what is cost people on the ground. Sustainable solution needs prioritized people, not just balanced it. Thank you so much. Maria, in many crises, bailout seem to prioritize financial stability over social welfare. The IMF says, turn out the lights so that we can get your finances under control.

Is this an inevitable trade-off? No, it's a political choice. And you're absolutely right to say that economics should be for everyone. We should all feel empowered to have opinions, on this. And I'd say, I mean, in terms of the trade-off between financial stability and social welfare, I'd say it's a false choice because we know from so much experience at this point that austerity creates financial problems in the long run. If you cut public spending and social welfare, yes, in the short term, maybe it will help you pay your debts to foreign banks, but it will also suffocate your economy and stunt your economic growth and development in the longer term, which means that you're stuck and you will remain reliant on borrowing more. In the past few years, Sri Lanka,

Ghana and others have accepted their 18th IMF bailout packages. 18th. They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I can't help but feel like that's exactly what we're doing when it comes to debt. You know what? I do feel like when we read about global inequality, poverty, debt, these are presented to us as unsolvable issues. And And hearing you just say, you know, it's not an inevitable trade-off. It's a choice. There are other options. That feels quite radical. But actually, the idea that they're insolvable, that just serves to reinforce the status quo. So, okay, let's talk about what other options there are. Let's talk about solutions. Yes. Precious. What changes are you campaigning for? What would

debt justice mean to you personally? Debt justice to me means creating a system that is fair, transparent and puts people face. That includes more accountability for leaders, fairly restructuring processes, and ensuring that countries are forced to choose between repairing dates and providing essential services. It also means recognising the links between debt inequality and climate vulnerability and addressing them together, not separately. Maria, I have two quick questions.

One is actually, if it's not a trade-off, what other options are there? What should be done to stop this crisis? I think one of the misconceptions is that addressing the debt crisis for global South countries is going to cost us somehow, is going to cost ordinary people in the UK, is going to cost UK taxpayers. That's simply not the case. And in fact, if the government were kind of brave enough, bold enough to pass a debt justice law so that private lenders can no longer sue countries that are in debt distress in English courts.

It would actually save UK taxpayers' money because at the moment we're effectively bailing out or subsidising the risky behaviour of BlackRock and other private financial firms because we're coming to the table and offering debt relief because we're seeing that people are suffering and that lives are on the line. But private creditors, their only responsibility is to their shareholders. So until we change the law, they will have no incentive to act fairly. So I think you're absolutely right to say, Matilda, you know, the moral arguments are clear and it's devastating hearing about the human impacts and pressures has laid those out really powerfully. But it's also just economic common sense. You know, a lot of these solutions are economic common sense.

The global financial system is not working for ordinary people, either at home in the UK or a broad. And since the rise of the far right and reform, we've seen this narrative about, you know, protecting our own and abandoning our global obligations. But the idea that we can turn our backs on global issues and that this will somehow benefit Britain is an absolute nonsense. None of us benefit from living in a less safe, less stable world with more conflicts. The climate crisis getting worse, pushing up prices of food and fuel in UK supermarkets, of increased defence spending. benefit from this and it's it's really about creating a financial system that actually just functions. My second question to wrap up is what can listeners do? What can the ordinary person who hears about this and is like, oh my God, what can we do to help? Yeah. So, I mean, support our campaign

for a debt justice law in the UK. Follow the CAFOD website. It's CAFOD.org.uk to see our latest campaigns from May the 1st. We'll be launching an action to run. to your MP to get them to demand a change in the law in the UK. And also bear in mind that the UK is taking over the presidency of the G20 in December this year. In November 2027, global leaders will come to the UK and there'll be a big summit and it'll be a real moment for us to pressure the UK government. So now is the time to write to your MP, write to the Chancellor, right to the Prime minister and demand that they use this historic opportunity of the G20 presidency being held in the UK to take real action on these issues. Thank you. And precious, do you have anything to share

with listeners about what they can do, where they can follow you, and maybe give us the date and time of where they can see you outside BlackRock? I'll be in London from 18th up to 28th of April and I'll be having a series of action, not just outside Blacklock and also in Manchester. And also, you can follow me at Citizens Network for Community Development in Zambia. It's a glass root organization. It's a women-led organization, empowering women on sustainable agriculture. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening.

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