W. H. Bruce Brittain
Essay
Jul
1977
Since 1974 - when the oil crisis hit and the world recession began - a number of developing countries that do not export oil (non-oil LDCs) have been borrowing heavily in the international credit markets. Surprisingly, private banks, not international agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have underwritten most of this massive debt buildup, as the table on page 734 shows. And this shift from traditional to non-traditional sources of financing, along with the sheer magnitude of the borrowing, has led to criticism of private banks for their handling of the situation.
Essay
Jan
1975
In the summer of 1929 a few prophets foresaw the coming stock market crash. Only one gifted with second sight could have foreseen the sequel-a world depression historians would single out by calling Great. In the United States at any rate, most of the business community continued to believe in permanent prosperity, until the bottom fell out. In contrast to this optimism on the brink of the abyss, the mood of business in the United States, Western Europe and Japan today is deeply pessimistic. The doomsayers among us see the current world economic slowdown not as an ordinary recession of the familiar postwar variety but as the onset of something closer to what happened in the early 1930s.
