Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: Empire by Other Means

There are empires that announce themselves with flags, armies, and gunfire. And then there are empires that arrive quietly, carrying spreadsheets, feasibility studies, and the reassuring language of development. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is John Perkins’s attempt to pull back the curtain on the latter.

This is not a book about conquest in the traditional sense. It is a memoir of seduction: how nations are wooed with promises of progress, how leaders are flattered with projections of prosperity, and how entire populations are bound—not with chains—but with debt.

Perkins’s central claim is simple and devastating: the modern empire no longer needs colonies. It needs loans.

“Economic power is the first weapon. Military force is the last.”
— John Perkins

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The Architecture of Economic Control

Perkins describes his former role as that of an “economic hit man”—a professional tasked with persuading developing nations to accept enormous loans from international financial institutions. These loans were ostensibly for infrastructure: power plants, dams, highways, airports. On paper, they represented modernisation. In practice, Perkins argues, they functioned as economic traps.

The numbers were always optimistic. Growth forecasts were inflated, risks minimised, repayment assumed. The debt itself was rarely the point. The leverage it created was.

The money, Perkins explains, rarely circulated within the borrowing country. It flowed back almost immediately to Western engineering firms, construction giants, and defence contractors. Local elites benefited. The poor did not. When repayment inevitably became impossible, the real negotiations began.

Votes at the United Nations. Access to oil fields. Military basing rights. Trade concessions. Political alignment.

Debt became a weapon—quiet, legal, and devastatingly effective.

Leaders Who Resisted—and Paid the Price

The most chilling moments in the book are not the economic models, but the human encounters. Perkins recounts meetings with leaders who understood the game and tried to resist it.

In Panama, General Omar Torrijos rejected proposals that would have surrendered control of the Panama Canal under the guise of development. In Ecuador, President Jaime Roldós challenged the assumption that economic growth justified environmental destruction and foreign dominance.

Both men died in suspicious plane crashes.

Perkins stops short of offering proof. What he offers instead is pattern recognition. When economic persuasion failed, other mechanisms followed: destabilisation, coups, or what he calls the “jackals”—covert operatives who ensured non-compliant leaders did not remain in power for long.

Whether one accepts every implication or not, the historical record is uncomfortably aligned with his account.

“This is how empire works when it doesn’t want to look like empire.”
— John Perkins

Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the Illusion of Development

Indonesia serves as Perkins’s showcase example: a country flooded with loans, praised as a development success, and held up as evidence that the system worked. Literacy rates improved. Infrastructure expanded. GDP rose.

But Perkins asks a more uncomfortable question: who benefited?

The wealth concentrated at the top. The rural poor remained poor. Environmental devastation was written off as collateral damage. The country’s political alignment shifted decisively toward Western interests.

In Saudi Arabia, the mechanism was refined further. Oil revenues were recycled into U.S. banks and corporations through arms deals and infrastructure projects, ensuring that even sovereign wealth ultimately served imperial stability.

This was not charity. It was design.

Debt as Empire: From Cold War to Present Day

One of the book’s enduring strengths is how easily its framework extends beyond the Cold War era in which Perkins operated.

Ukraine today offers a stark example. War has devastated its economy. External financing keeps the state functioning. IMF programmes promise stability, but at the cost of long-term indebtedness and deep structural dependency. The immediate crisis justifies the terms; the future consequences are postponed.

In Venezuela, decades of debt, sanctions, and economic isolation have hollowed out state capacity while intensifying foreign pressure over natural resources—particularly oil. The language has changed. The logic has not.

Across Africa, the pattern repeats with brutal consistency. Infrastructure loans balloon into debt crises. Austerity measures follow. Public services are cut. Protests erupt. Governments are blamed for mismanagement while the architecture that produced the crisis remains untouched.

Palestine represents the most extreme version of economic control: an economy constrained not only by debt and aid dependency, but by physical restriction, banking controls, and the deliberate prevention of sovereign development. There is no illusion of partnership here—only management.

The Moral Question Perkins Cannot Escape

Critics of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man often focus on Perkins himself. They question his evidence. They debate his centrality. They accuse him of exaggeration or self-mythologising.

Some of these criticisms are fair. The book is anecdotal. It is confessional rather than archival. It asks to be read as testimony, not as a court document.

But this misses the larger point.

Even if Perkins overstated his role, the system he describes is no longer in dispute. Debt dependency, structural adjustment, and economic coercion are now openly acknowledged features of the global order.

The uncomfortable truth is not whether Perkins was an economic hit man.

It is how many still are.

Why the Book Still Matters

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man endures because it names something most political language works hard to obscure: that violence does not always arrive with bombs.

Sometimes it arrives with contracts.

Sometimes it arrives with aid.

Sometimes it arrives smiling, promising development, asking only for obedience in return.

Perkins’s book is not perfect. But it is necessary. It forces the reader to confront the possibility that what we call “help” may in fact be control, and that the most effective empires are the ones we are trained not to see.

The age of conquest never ended. It just learned to speak economics.

Thank You for Reading!

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it insightful. If you did, feel free to subscribe to receive updates about future posts via email, leave a comment below, or share it with your friends and followers. Your feedback and engagement mean a lot to me, and it helps keep this community growing.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into topics like this, don’t forget to check out the Donc Voila Quoi Podcast, where I discuss these ideas in more detail. You can also follow me on Pinterest @doncvoilaquoi and Instagram @jessielouisevernon, though my accounts have been shut down before (like my old @doncvoilaquoi on Instagram), so keep an eye out for updates.

Thank You for Reading!

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it insightful. If you did, feel free to subscribe to receive updates about future posts via email, leave a comment below, or share it with your friends and followers. Your feedback and engagement mean a lot to me, and it helps keep this community growing.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into topics like this, don’t forget to check out the Donc Voila Quoi Podcast, where I discuss these ideas in more detail. You can also follow me on Pinterest @doncvoilaquoi and Instagram @jessielouisevernon, though my accounts have been shut down before (like my old @doncvoilaquoi on Instagram), so keep an eye out for updates.