As they campaigned for office in 2008, Barack Obama and Joe Biden promised to lead an effort to look into a novel use of loan sanctions to help prevent "odious debt." But four years later, the ...

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "lead a multilateral effort to address the issue of 'odious debt' by investigating ways in which 'loan sanctions' might be employed to ...

Curtailing odious debt, in contrast, is a self-enforcing sanction. The difference is that, as long as a few creditors and investors are willing to lend to and invest in a country that has refused to ...