Charade of Debt Restructuring

THE gravity of the crisis' facing the Western multinational banks last year can be gauged from the fact that in a period of just over nine months, bet- ween January and early October 1983, as much as $ 60,000 million of debt owed to these banks had to be 'restructured' because borrowers were not in a position to make repayments of that order. Had defaults on anywhere near that scale actually occurred, some of the supposedly soundest names in international banking would have found themselves tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.