88/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
silting up significantly increased Inga II's operating costs.
Furthermore, the industrial development that would have justified
the second complex never came about (Galand and Lefevre, 1996).
Inga did indeed generate electricity - transmitted through a
network of thousands of kilometres of power lines linking up
strategic industrial centres. Yet the worst thing about this whole
classic 'white elephant' tale, is that Inga was not designed nor used
to provide even a spark of electricity to power village water pumps,
to light local health clinics or to improve in any way the lot of the
hundreds of thousands of people living under the web of high-
voltage power lines. A study carried out at the request of the
Belgian Minister for Cooperation and Development makes the
origin of such risky ventures quite clear.In the context of crisis in Western countries, excess liquidity in
the international monetary system - combined with the near-
total absence of controls over financial markets - led bankers to
redirect their financial surplus into the Third World. As such,
they became specialists in the transformation and recycling of
savings from the Third World into loans to the Third World. The
resulting debt was highly concentrated in a small number of
countries, and owed to a small number of largely American
lender banks.
Big American banks had already begun to loan to Third
World countries in the late 1960s. But the flood of petrodollars
onto international capital markets led to lending of epidemic
proportions, with door-to-door 'money salesmen' criss-crossing
the Third World in the hunt for borrowers. (E. Simons, B.
Verhaegen and J-C. Willame, Endettement, technologie et indus-
trialisation au Zaire, 1970-1981)THE OCTOBER 1979 U-TURN
In the 1970s, global inflation reached levels that were intolerable
from the standpoint of the capitalist system (Adda, 19 9 6; de Brunhoff
in Chesnais, 1996). Real interest rates on loans, accounting for
inflation, were negative, which was damaging to creditors.
A radical U-turn was made in October 1979, under the guidance
of the head of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volker, and British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher. Volker and Thatcher represented,