Jeffrey Sachs Billions Quotations

We give away tens of billions to Brazil, or to one place or another, without thinking. But in those days, to give even a tiny amount to Russia was viewed almost as anathema by many parts of our own society and our political leadership, whether it was the Bush administration or the Clinton administration.

If you have billions and billions of dollars coming due in a country in a short period of time, and if a sense of panic develops among your creditors, so that everybody demands the money out all at once, it's almost inevitable that the debtor economy will collapse, because it won't be able to come up with that amount of money in a short period.