Structural Adjustment

Austerity as a condition of rescue. The patient, critics note, rarely recovers.

Structural adjustment is documented policy history: loan conditionality (privatization, austerity, capital-account opening) imposed across the 1980s-90s debt crises, with the IMF's own Independent Evaluation Office and later research (including the Fund's 2016 'Neoliberalism: Oversold?' self-critique) conceding harms the critics alleged for decades. The node needs no hidden layer: the mechanism (debt leverage as policy control) operated openly, and its architects' own retrospectives are the sources. Links economic hitmen and the Volcker-era debt machinery.