Latin American debt crisis

The Latin American debt crisis (Spanish: Crisis de la deuda latinoamericana; Portuguese: Crise da dívida latino-americana) was a financial crisis that originated in the early 1980s (and for some countries starting in the 1970s), often known as La Década Perdida (The Lost Decade), when Latin American countries reached a point where their foreign debt exceeded their earning power, and they could not repay it. The IMF's response to the crisis has been criticized for prolonging unsustainable borrowing and transferring private banking losses onto taxpayers, which deepened the region’s debt overhang and delayed necessary market corrections.