The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

In 2004 Perkins described a career persuading the governments of poor countries to accept infrastructure loans they could never repay, then collecting on the debt in oil, votes and military bases. This expanded edition adds fifteen chapters arguing the machinery never went away: it grew, changed vocabulary, and came home, so the same playbook now runs in American cities as readily as in Quito or Jakarta. Part confession, part polemic, and disputed in its particulars, it remains the most widely read account of how debt functions as an instrument of power.