Debt Crisis... What Debt Crisis? Workshop on the Literature of the 1980s Financial Disorder
PRIN Research Project (MIUR, 2015), "The Making of the Washington Consensus. Negotiating international assets, debts and power (1979-91)"
Friday, 24th of November, 2017, 10.30-17.00; Aula Farneti, Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna Strada Maggiore, 45, 40125, Bologna
Debt Crisis... What Debt Crisis? Workshop on the Literature of the 1980s Financial Disorder
The workshop will debate the historiography and literature on the so-called debt-crisis of the 1980s and integrate it with the individual bibliography that each of the project members has found on his/her specific case-study. The keynote-speech by Prof. Youssef Cassis will contextualize the topic by overviewing the major changes in international finance in the 1980s.
The project investigates the politics of the negotiations on international debts and assets that took place in the 1980s. Following the notable rise in international official and private loans to sovereign borrowers during the 1970s, and the increase in interest rates after 1979, the 1980s were marked by a long series of defaults, moratoria on repayment, renegotiations of existing loans and negotiations on new loans. These involved states, banks and international institutions alike, in an often changing picture of cooperation and confrontation between and among creditors and debtors. While in many ways financial turbulence remained the rule also in the following years, the beginning of the 1990s can be said to mark a periodizing junction: on the one hand, the "Brady Plan" reduced the sistemic risks of the debt/asset morass; on the other, the so-called "Washington consensus", largely encapsulating the original creditors' view, clearly emerged as the hegemonic doctrine on debt/asset issues.
Since the second half of the 1980s, such complex phenomenon has passed down onto history under the label of the "international debt crisis" (sometimes also as "the Latin American debt crisis", given the high incidence of Latin American countries among debtors). A wide literature has dealt with the subject, with renewed interest since the beginning of the "great recession" in 2008. Most of such literature, however, suffers from two main (interrelated) flaws: on the one hand, there are only a few case studies based on archival research; on the other, there appears to be a perspective bias, for which it is often assumed that creditor/debtor negotiations necessarily had to end with the creditors' upper hand.
Programme:
10.30-11.00 Greetings and Communications
11.00-11.45 Keynote Speech by Youssef Cassis, Professor of Economic History, European University Institute, Italy
11.45-12.30 Discussion
12.30-14.00 Break, Buffet Lunch
14.00-17.30 Roundtable on the common bibliography, and in regard to the specific case-studies.
Participants:
Massimiliano Trentin, Duccio Basosi, Mauro Campus, Michele Marchi, Francesco Privitera, Alessandro Romagnoli, Luis Beneduzi, Marzia Rosti, Laura Sabani, Francesco Petrini
Organizing and Scientific Committee: Massimiliano Trentin, Duccio Basosi, Mauro Campus
The Workshop is open to all scholars and students from the University of Bologna
Pubblicato il: 30 ottobre 2017
