Money! You either have it, or you don’t. Socialist Romania did not. Therefore, it had to borrow money from abroad in order to meet its ambitious development goals. This episode explores socialist Romania’s failed crusade on the sea of global high finance starting from the late 1960s up until the 1980s, discussing the underlying reason for the turn towards austerity: the decision to pay off the accumulated foreign debt in its entirety.
This podcast was originally published at podcasts.ceu.edu as part of the Sound Relations Project based at Central European University, Budapest, and is done in collaboration with the Blinken Open Society Archives.