Following the lacklustre performance of many developing countries over the last fifteen years, the problem of international debt is once again creeping back into the policy limelight. The achievements of structural adjustment and new lending programmes that have been at the heart of previous policy responses have been limited in terms of their ability to deliver new growth to debtor nations. Latin American countries are still heavily indebted to multilateral institutions with heavy debt burdens still threatening access to markets (World Bank 1995; Langfield 1995; and UNCTAD 1995). Similarly, some of the Asian “success stories” are once again becoming exposed to dangerously high levels of sovereign debt, especially to Japan (Ana and van Hees 1995). Such developments are naturally a renewed challenge to policy makers and to the accepted understandings of the causes of the crisis and its sustenance. It is postulated that analytical approaches that examine the issues surrounding new lending in the 1970s or, more commonly, the spate of defaults started by Mexico in 1982, are focusing attention on what is symptomatic, rather than on what is causal. By doing so, there is a danger that such analyses will provide a new inheritance of misinterpreted policy developments and limited future options.