Join us for this presentation on the economic history of post-WWII decades, sovereign debt and financial multilateralism.
Presentation
The debt crisis of the 1982-1990 is the second largest such episode in history, after the 1930s. More than 35 developing countries, mostly in Latin America, restructured their sovereign debts, often two or three times in row, while following tough economic programs: the ‘Washington Consensus’ and ‘structural adjustment’ were born there, in those years.
This crisis thus marked the end of the postwar decades, incl. import-substitution, state-led development and regulated finance. But it was also triggered by the full collapse of the most short-lived capital market in history: lending to developing countries had only re-opened around 1973, it seized in 1982, when Mexico threatened to default; and after 1990 it had to be rebuilt from scratch, on an entirely new financial, regulatory and political basis.
Lastly, the presentation will discuss the central position of the IMF in crisis management and debt restructurings. Never in history has a multilateral agency managed such a huge crisis out of its own offices, in Washington, and in direct, constant negotiations with tens of governments and hundreds of commercial banks. In this sense, the 1980s also marked the apex of postwar financial multilateralism.
Speaker
Professor Sgard's current research focuses on the construction and regulation of markets, seen from a “bottom-up” or micro-based perspective, in which a strong accent is given to legal rules and procedures. Here we find in particular the figures of the judge and the arbiter, but also, for example, that of the economic missions of the IMF which try to mediate between countries in debt crisis and their creditors. This is the theme of his last book, published at the end of 2023: The Debt Crisis of the 1980s, Law and Political Economy. This multidisciplinary work is based in particular on interviews with the main personalities who managed this crisis (de Larosière, Volcker, Rhodes, etc.), on the other hand on important archival work (IMF, the New York Fed, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, the Bank for International Settlements, etc).
Discussant
Grégoire Mallard, Director of Research and Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Grégoire Mallard (gregoire.mallard@graduateinstitute.ch) is Director of Research and Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. After earning his PhD at Princeton University in 2008, Pr. Mallard was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University until he joined the Institute. He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge University Press 2019). From 2017 until 2022, he has lead an ERC project titled Bombs, Banks and Sanctions, which focused on the evolution of unilateral sanctions in the global context of the Iran nuclear negotiations and global banking reforms, from which he created the Geneva Sanctions Hub. He is also the co-editor of Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets (Cambridge University Press 2016), and Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science (Routledge 2008). His other publications focus on prediction, the role of knowledge and ignorance in transnational lawmaking and the study of harmonization as a social process—some of which can be download on his website. In 2024, he has founded a new Center on digital humanities and multilateralism at the Institute with the goal of reviving the interest for the future of multilateralism through an innovative analysis of its past.
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