What's behind Sri Lanka’s crippling debt crisis?

Sri Lanka has been hit by a triple whammy of economic shocks and has gone to the IMF for a bailout. It may just be the first domino to fall in a global debt crisis.

Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa
Gotabaya Rajapaksa: struggling to cope
(Image credit: © ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images)

Sri Lanka is undergoing a full-scale economic collapse and political crisis, with every chance of further violent unrest. Last week the parliamentary speaker warned of an imminent hunger crisis. This week the “new” prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, a septuagenarian on his fifth stint as PM since the 1990s, warned that the country had run out of petrol, and that it desperately needed $75m of foreign currency to pay for essential imports to avoid social collapse.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.