Today, the world’s governments are more indebted than ever before — and the international financial system, from multilateral institutions to creditor groups to rating agencies, is only reinforcing that reality.
That’s according to a new report commissioned by Pope Francis, the late leader of the Catholic Church. The report calls for a “structural transformation” in the international financial system, and says the world has a “moral obligation” to launch a second Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, or HIPC, Initiative, the first iteration of which was launched in 1996.
In the nearly three decades since, that program — along with a complementary Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, or MDRI — has brought 37 countries out of $100 billion in debt, according to the World Bank.