posted 24th December 2025
Debt As Dominion
Debt as Dominion: A Sovereign Reading of Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins is not a memoir in the conventional sense. It is a disclosure document-imperfect, selective, and constrained-but nonetheless damning. For the Institute of Black Nobility (IoBN), the book matters not because it is sensational, but because it confirms a structural truth long understood by serious students of power: modern empire prefers balance sheets to battalions, contracts to cannons, and signatures to sieges.
Perkins describes a system in which development loans are engineered to fail, projections are inflated to justify borrowing, and sovereign states are bound-quietly, legally-into dependency. The method is bloodless; the outcomes are not. When debt replaces invasion, the result is the same: control of resources, policy capture, and the erosion of self-determination. The genius of the system is not its cruelty, but its plausibility. Everything appears lawful. Everything is deniable.
IoBN reads Confessions as an admission of method, not a confession of sin. The book’s true value lies in what it reveals about power’s preferred operating environment: opacity, complexity, and moral distance. Violence is outsourced to spreadsheets. Accountability is dissolved into process.
The Architecture of Compliance
At the heart of Perkins’ account is a simple mechanism: tie national ambition to external finance, then condition survival on compliance. Infrastructure becomes leverage. Growth forecasts become instruments of persuasion. When repayment strains arrive-as they are designed to-creditors do not demand collapse; they demand concessions. Ports, pipelines, votes in international fora, security alignments. The state remains nominally sovereign, yet functionally managed.
This is not a conspiracy; it is an incentive structure. And incentive structures do not require villains-only participants.
The book exposes how elites are cultivated, not coerced. A class emerges fluent in the language of development while insulated from its consequences. In this way, Confessions documents not a rogue practice, but a repeatable model. That model persists wherever knowledge asymmetry meets financial desperation.
What the Book Gets Right-and What It Misses
Perkins is candid about tactics, less so about architecture. He names roles but not the deeper logic that makes those roles durable. The system does not depend on one country, one corporation, or one ideology. It survives because it is adaptive, legalistic, and moralised as “progress.”
IoBN therefore treats Confessions as a starting point, not a conclusion. The book indicts debt, but stops short of diagnosing why debt works: because institutional literacy is weak, because governance capacity is uneven, and because post-colonial states were forced to build futures atop imported models misaligned with local realities.
Where Perkins frames revelation as redemption, IoBN insists on reconstruction.
From Exposure to Remedy
Exposure alone does not dismantle power. Institutions do. The antidote to economic coercion is not outrage; it is competence. Not slogans, but structures. Not charity, but sovereignty of knowledge.
IoBN’s doctrine diverges here: the counter to economic hitmanship is not isolation, nor reactive nationalism, but knowledge sovereignty-the ability of states to read contracts, stress-test projections, adjudicate risk, and align development with civilisational logic rather than creditor preference. When governance literacy rises, leverage falls.
A Warning to the Comfortable
Confessions of an Economic Hitman should unsettle those who believe domination requires malice. It does not. It requires participation without understanding, ambition without preparation, and leaders trained to equate borrowing with progress.
The book’s enduring relevance lies in its warning: the most effective empires do not announce themselves. They audit.
IoBN’s Verdict
This text belongs on every serious reading list-not as gospel, but as evidence. It confirms that the modern battlefield is contractual, the modern weapon is debt, and the modern casualty is sovereignty. But it also confirms something else: that systems reliant on asymmetry are vulnerable to education.
Power recedes when comprehension advances.
For IoBN, Confessions of an Economic Hitman is neither prophecy nor penance. It is a case study. And the lesson is clear: nations do not need saviours. They need capacity. They need institutions that understand the language of power well enough to refuse its traps.
That, ultimately, is the work ahead.