The U.S. has significant interests involved in the world debt problem. It affects the profitability and even the stability of our banking system, but the debt problem also matters because debt service requires trade surpluses for debt- ors. Debtor countries have made their goods extra...

The G-8 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is the next step of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). There are two reasons why MDRI is unlikely to help poor countries. First, the amount of money at stake is trivial. The roughly $2 billion of annual debt payments to be...