BEHOLD, THERE COME SEVEN YEARS OF GREAT PLENTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND OF

Egypt. And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten. Genesis 41:29–30 The debt crisis of the 1980s engulfed whole regions of the developing world: Latin America most broadly and painfully, but also Eastern Europe and Africa. In all, it directly affected at least 20 countries, with more than 30 distinct crisis episodes.1 This trouble lasted the whole of the decade, and the withdrawal of bank loans forced the most heavily indebted countries to cut spending and revert to borrowing from the IMF and other official creditors. Latin America experienced a “lost decade, ” and incomes at the end of the period were lower than at the beginning. The debt crisis finally ended in 1989, when a drop in world interest rates, official acceptance of the need for negotiated debt reductions, and the cumulative effect of several years of economic reforms made the burden of developing-country debt more tolerable. The Brady Plan of 1989, named after U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, formed the keystone of the debt-reduction strategy that ended the crisis. Brady’s deputy, David C. Mulford, developed the plan in 1988 and the first months of 1989 with the involvemen