Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa Will Default On Billions of Dollars of “Immoral and Illegitimate” Foreign Debt

Hunky Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who announced this weekend that he would probably buy arms from Iran in order to secure the border Ecuador shares with Colombia, has decided to default on billions of dollars of foreign debt. President Correa called part of Ecuador’s $10 billion foreign debt “obviously immoral and illegitimate”. He also made sure to call international lenders “monsters” and said some of their debt had been borrowed illegally by a previous administration. That’s similar to something we told Sallie Mae.

The default will mark the first time in seven years that a Latin American country has failed to make a loan payment. The last Latin American country to default on a loan was Argentina in 2001.

Says President Correa:

“We’ll present a proposal to restructure the debt in order to resolve this problem as fast as possible. As president I couldn’t allow us to keep paying a debt that was obviously immoral and illegitimate.”

In case you’re wondering, President Correa received his Masters and Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yes, he is a U.S.-trained economist.

Ecuador defaults on foreign debt [BBC News]