ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the capitalist world-economy has experienced four principal periods or waves of global debt-service incapacity since the early nineteenth century, with peaks of crisis in the late 1820s, the late 1870s, the early 1930s and the early 1980s. While global debt crises prior to World War II were characterized chiefly by outright default, the open outbreak of debt-service incapacity during the postwar period has been forestalled by the arrangement of multilateral debt-rescheduling agreements. Yet, as the present debt crisis is still far from settled, it would be risky already to conclude that the rescheduling strategy is superior to the previously used "default strategy." On the background of the historical evidence discussed in Chapter 5, one may rather ask how exactly earlier debt crises were finally settled and what can be learned from those experiences for a better understanding of and an improved coping with the present difficulties.
