On January 12 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 on the Richter scale ripped through Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and other parts of Haiti. More than 1.5 million people, representing 15 per cent of the country's population, were directly affected by the earthquake. According to the Haitian government, 316,000 people lost their lives. An estimated US$ 7.8 billion dollars of damage was caused - equivalent to more than 120 per cent of the GDP of 2009. Everyone in Haiti has a story that begins or ends on 12 January and many wounds remain open. Everyone lost someone. Everyone remembers where they were that day.

Austerity and the Washington Consensus do not need to be the “new normal.” There are alternatives, even in the poorest countries.

Ahora existe un amplio consenso en las comunidades financieras y de desarrollo internacionales de que está creciendo una nueva ola de crisis de deuda

There is now widespread consensus within the international finance and development communities that a new wave of debt crises is unfurling. 

Studying EU policies thoroughly means studying policies of externalization. 

In a valuable step forward to support human rights compliant economic policy-making, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) called on 21 March for governments and intergovernmental organisations to make use of new UN guidance when developing economic reforms.

At the start of the New Year, the number of countries at high risk of debt distress is growing at an alarming rate. With so many crises already ongoing, and more expected to emerge over the next 12 months, it’s no surprise that the topic is high on the agenda of international organisations. But perhaps it’s not as high up as it should be in order to head off a looming crisis…

First in a two-part blog series 

This article was initially published in Eurodad member SLUG's newsletter

Ten years ago, on 15 September 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This collapse is largely seen as a key event of the North Atlantic financial crisis, which also had spillover effects on the rest of the world. Around the globe, this decade-long crisis has caused massive unemployment, as well as rising poverty and inequality. It has been used and abused to slash people’s rights – in particular the rights of workers – while the financial sector that caused the crisis has benefited from huge publicly funded bailouts. Ten years after the last crisis began, global debt levels are higher than before, and debt vulnerabilities are increasingly hard to manage. That’s why activists all over the world are standing up to call for fundamental reforms of the financial sector on 15 September 2018.