The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man — Summary

Early in 1971, a twenty-six-year-old man rings the bell of an apartment on Beacon Street in Boston. The woman who opens the door is elegant, well read, and knows exactly what she wants from him. She does not soften a word of it. After a few meetings she says the sentence he will hear for the rest of his life: "My assignment is to mold you into an economic hit man. No one can know about your involvement, not even your wife." Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds: "Once you're in, you're in for life."

The young man's name is John Perkins. He is not handed a pistol or a false passport. He is handed a well-paid job at a Boston engineering firm and a stack of spreadsheets. His job title could not be duller: economist. His actual task is to estimate how much electricity the island of Java will need twenty years from now. And if he writes that single number high enough, an entire country goes into debt.

This is where most people shrug. A forecast? A spreadsheet? How does that become a weapon? Exactly the way Perkins did not dare write down for thirty years. Whoever writes the numbers writes the future. If you claim that a poor country's economy will expand by nineteen percent a year, loans can be built on that claim. If the country can never repay those loans, that is not an accident. That is the plan.

The book is about how the son of a New Hampshire schoolteacher became an employee of the most expensive lie factory in the world. It also follows how he got from there to a confession. Along the way it answers three questions. How do you conquer a country with credit instead of soldiers? What happens to the leader who says no? And why did the same machine turn on its own citizens by the 2000s?