Those “gross irregularities,” which Budhoo claims were deliberate and not mere “sloppy calculations,” were taken as fact by the financial markets, which promptly classified Trinidad as a bad risk and cut off its financing. The country’s economic problems—triggered by a drop in the price of oil, its primary export—quickly became calamitous, and it was forced to beg the IMF for a bailout. The fund then demanded that it accept what Budhoo described as the IMF’s “deadliest medicine”: layoffs, wage cuts and the “whole gamut” of structural adjustment policies. He described the process as the
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