Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Have you ever wondered how nations fall into debt traps that seem impossible to escape, even when they are rich in natural resources? In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins pulls back the curtain on the hidden mechanisms that drive global inequality and bind developing nations to the will of powerful corporate and political interests. Perkins argues that modern empire building doesn't require armies or invasions—it relies on debt, deceit, and the illusion of development. The core argument: a global corporatocracy composed of banks, multinational companies, and government agencies quietly dominates the world through financial manipulation, trapping poorer nations in perpetual obligation to serve corporate interests.

Perkins, who once worked as a chief economist at a major consulting firm, describes his former role as an "economic hit man (EHM)"—a highly paid professional whose job was to convince developing nations to accept huge loans for infrastructure projects. These loans, often calculated to exceed a nation's means of repayment, went back to U.S. corporations hired to complete the projects. Once the country defaulted, the U.S. and its corporate allies demanded political favors, resource concessions, or military cooperation in return. Perkins reveals that this strategy—what he calls the modern equivalent of imperial conquest—relies on subtler weapons: spreadsheets instead of swords, contracts instead of cannons, and money instead of militaries.

The Machinery of Empire Building

The book’s opening chapters establish the machinery of this financial warfare. Perkins explains the hierarchy of manipulation: first come the EHMs, who sell debt and dependency to target countries under the guise of development aid. When they fail, “the jackals”—CIA-backed operatives trained for coups and assassinations—step in. Only if both fail does the military intervene, as witnessed in Iraq and Panama. This process ensures that no leader can oppose U.S. commercial interests for long without grave risk. Perkins ties the deaths of Ecuador’s Jaime Roldós and Panama’s Omar Torrijos, both reformist presidents who resisted imperial demands, to this shadowy system of enforcement. Their plane crashes, he claims, were acts of assassination designed to make examples of dissenters.

The Economics of Subjugation

Perkins uses his experience in Indonesia, Panama, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to demonstrate the standard script of economic coercion. He and his firm were paid to produce inflated forecasts that justified enormous development loans for power plants, ports, and highways. The projects benefited a small elite and foreign corporations but devastated local populations through debt and dependency. Perkins admits that he deliberately manipulated economic data to show wildly optimistic growth projections. The goal wasn’t development—it was control. Once indebted, nations had little choice but to align politically with the United States and provide access to natural resources, from oil in the Middle East to copper and forests in Latin America. “It is a system of slavery,” Perkins concludes, “by which the debtor nations are forever at our mercy.”

Moral Awakening and Confession

Deeply personal as well as political, the book tracks Perkins’s own moral reckoning. Recruited by a mysterious woman named Claudine, who seduced him into the profession and warned him he’d be “in for life,” Perkins recalls the lavish rewards that numbed his conscience: five-star hotels, enormous salaries, and access to powerful men. Yet guilt slowly wears him down. Encounters with indigenous peoples in the Amazon, with reformist leaders like Torrijos, and with ordinary citizens suffering the consequences of his work push him toward resignation. His eventual decision to quit, he writes, came while standing among the ruins of a Caribbean sugar plantation once worked by slaves—a moment when he realized his own complicity in a modern form of bondage.

Why It Matters Today

Published in 2004, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man remains profoundly relevant. Perkins ties the empire of debt to modern globalization, revealing how multinational corporations have supplanted old empires in exploiting developing nations. He warns that the same logic driving economic manipulation abroad also corrupts democracy at home. His message is both confessional and exhortative: acknowledging personal guilt is only the first step toward collective redemption. Like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, his book seeks to awaken citizens to complicity in the machinery of empire and calls for a more ethical, sustainable world order. Perkins’s central claim is simple yet searing—you and I live at the heart of a global system that enslaves others in our name, and breaking that cycle begins with understanding how it works.

John Perkins traces the origins of his unlikely career from small-town New Hampshire to the shadowy corridors of global finance. His story begins, surprisingly, with personal insecurity rather than ambition. Raised in a modest family living among the wealthy elite of a prep school, he learned early what it meant to envy power. When a recruiter from the National Security Agency profiled him during a college interview, his psychological vulnerabilities—his craving for approval, sexual repression, and resentment toward privilege—made him “seducible.” These qualities, Perkins later realized, would make him the perfect candidate for the NSA’s network of civilian economic operatives.

From Peace Corps Idealism to Corporate Espionage

Perkins’s recruitment was triggered by a paradoxical career detour. In the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, his father-in-law’s friend arranged a deferment through the NSA—but instead of joining immediately, he volunteered for the Peace Corps. Stationed in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he worked with the Shuar people, teaching basic economic skills. What seemed like charity was actually an apprenticeship in cultural observation. In the jungle, he met Einar Greve, a U.S. Army Reserve colonel and executive at a Boston consulting firm, Chas. T. Main (MAIN). Greve offered him a job that merged his interests in economics and adventure. Soon after, Perkins returned to Boston and began his formal EHM training.

Claudine: The Seductress and Trainer

In a sequence that reads like a spy novel, Perkins is mentored by Claudine Martin, an enigmatic “special consultant.” Over afternoon meetings in her Beacon Street apartment, Claudine reveals his true job: to convince foreign governments to accept massive development loans that would enslave them to the United States. She explains the hierarchy: the corporatocracy—an alliance of corporations, banks, and governments—funded the loans; consulting engineers like MAIN implemented the projects; and EHMs produced data proving their viability. The greater the loan, the deeper the dependency. “Once you’re in,” Claudine warns him, “you’re in for life.” The combination of sexual allure and patriotic duty makes refusal difficult. (This echoes Aldous Huxley’s theme in Brave New World: pleasure as a tool of control.)

The Moral Disguise of Development

Perkins’s initiation reveals how moral language conceals imperial goals. Phrases like “reducing poverty” and “modernizing infrastructure” serve to mask the reality of exploitation. Claudine explains how economic growth—measured by GNP—can increase inequality, since wealth concentrated among elites still counts as national progress. Yet this deception convinces both policymakers and citizens back home that they are spreading prosperity. For a young man desperate for meaning and belonging, this mission sounds noble. By the time he boards a plane to Indonesia for his first assignment, the transformation is complete: the Peace Corps idealist has become a corporate mercenary armed not with guns but with statistics.

Perkins’s first major assignment in 1971 took him to Indonesia, a nation freshly emerging from political chaos under General Suharto. The U.S. sought to ensure that this oil-rich Muslim country would not fall to communist influence after the Vietnam debacle. His employer, MAIN, was contracted by the World Bank and USAID to create a master plan for Java’s electrification—a massive infrastructure project intended to anchor Indonesia firmly in the capitalist orbit. It was a perfect stage for the EHM model.

A Mirage of Development

Jakarta dazzled Perkins with its contradictions: luxury hotels for foreign executives surrounded by slums, child beggars, and open sewers. Yet official briefings promised he was helping Indonesia “save itself from communism.” His task was to project 25-year economic growth that would justify enormous loans for power plants and industrial parks. When his technical partner, an old engineer named Howard Parker, warned him that such projections were absurd—no economy grows at 17% annually—Perkins dismissed him as naïve. Later, when Parker resigned in protest, Perkins inherited his senior title and the pressure to deliver optimistic numbers. The consequence: Indonesia borrowed billions it could never repay, and U.S. firms reaped the profits.

The Birth of the Corporatocracy

The Indonesia project crystallized a new world order that Perkins calls the corporatocracy—a seamless alliance of corporate, banking, and government elites. Figures like World Bank president Robert McNamara—formerly head of Ford Motor Company—embodied the revolving door between public service and corporate power. Perkins realized that the same men running energy conglomerates now directed international aid programs and wrote the rules of global capitalism. The results were predictable: each infrastructure project generated contracts for American firms while indebting host nations to Washington. (Naomi Klein later described this same system as “disaster capitalism.”)

The Awakening of Conscience

Despite his success, Indonesia planted seeds of doubt in Perkins’s mind. Encounters with locals—especially a young student named Rasy—opened his eyes to how Indonesians viewed him: not as a savior, but as an inquisitor enforcing a new colonial order. Watching shadow-puppet plays where caricatures of Richard Nixon devoured Muslim nations, he began to grasp the resentment bred by U.S. policy. His conversations with university students revealed an emerging worldview: the coming conflict would not be communism versus capitalism but Islam versus Western materialism. Perkins’s growing unease didn’t stop him from excelling; yet Indonesia became the archetype for future EHM campaigns—debt disguised as development and moral corrosion disguised as progress.

Panama represents both the zenith and the moral breaking point of Perkins’s career. Sent there in 1972, he was tasked with securing massive development loans to lock the country—and its strategic canal—into U.S. influence. But he met his match in General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s populist president. Torrijos was unlike any leader Perkins had encountered: charismatic, principled, and committed to lifting his people from poverty. Instead of succumbing to bribery, Torrijos recruited Perkins to help “build plans that serve the poor.” The general aimed to retake the Panama Canal from U.S. control and make his country a model for Latin America.

A Leader Too Honest for Empire

Torrijos admired fellow reformers like Ecuador’s Jaime Roldós, and together they envisioned what Perkins calls a "Latin America liberated from economic colonialism." But such independence threatened powerful corporations and their political allies. Companies like Bechtel, with executives George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, coveted contracts for a new sea-level canal project. When Torrijos considered Japanese partnership instead, he earned their enmity. Perkins claims that Torrijos’s assassination in a 1981 plane crash—coming just two months after Roldós’s identical death—bore the CIA’s signature. By refusing the empire’s deal, both men sealed their fate. Their deaths serve as stark examples of the jackals’ work when EHMs fail.

The Awakening of a Witness

Perkins’s meetings with Torrijos profoundly shook his faith in the system. In these conversations, he saw what ethical leadership looked like—a mirror reflecting his own moral bankruptcy. After Torrijos’s death, guilt overwhelmed Perkins; he recognized the pattern repeating worldwide. Leaders loyal to the poor were eliminated, while those who cooperated prospered. Later U.S. invasions, such as the 1989 assault on Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, confirmed to him that the corporatocracy maintained control by any means, from loans to bombs. Torrijos’s vision—a hemisphere of justice and sovereignty—died with him, and for Perkins, it marked the beginning of his rebellion against the empire he had helped build.

If Indonesia was the prototype and Panama the warning, Saudi Arabia became the masterpiece of the EHM system. In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, Washington desperately needed to prevent another embargo and to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The solution, engineered by Perkins’s firm and the U.S. Treasury, was ingenious: the Saudis would invest their oil revenues in U.S. government securities, while the interest from those investments would fund American companies to modernize Saudi infrastructure. The result was a trillion-dollar circular flow of money—a financial machine that cemented U.S.-Saudi dependency and guaranteed both the kingdom’s stability and America’s oil supply.

Engineering Dependency

Perkins describes how “SAMA”—the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, jokingly nicknamed the Saudi Arabian Money-Laundering Affair—set the gold standard for covert empire-building. U.S. firms built power grids, airports, and entire cities using Saudi money, but the expertise and technology remained American-owned. The Saudis became modern without becoming independent. This arrangement also protected the royal family: in exchange for investing in America, Washington guaranteed military and political support regardless of internal repression or links to terrorism. Later revelations that Saudi charities financed radical networks, including Osama bin Laden’s early operations, underscored how such pacts can backfire disastrously.

Moral Corruption and Personal Compromise

Perkins recounts his own descent into corruption during this deal. To win over a key Saudi prince, he arranged illicit favors—including supplying women—and witnessed firsthand how sex and greed lubricated global politics. The scheme succeeded spectacularly: it funneled billions into U.S. industries while presenting itself as benevolent modernization. Yet Perkins saw how it entrenched authoritarianism and fueled future extremism. He later realized that this deal, which seemed a triumph, was a Faustian bargain linking oil, power, and violence in ways that still define geopolitics today. Saudi Arabia proved that economic conquest through finance could accomplish what military force never could—buy the loyalty of an entire kingdom without firing a single shot.

After a decade of success, Perkins’s conscience reached a breaking point. Promotions, wealth, and fame had brought only emptiness. One night in the Virgin Islands, staring at the ruins of a former slave plantation, he realized the parallel between colonial slavery and the financial bondage he had perpetuated. “For ten years,” he writes, “I had been the heir to those slavers who marched Africans onto ships bound for the New World.” That night, he decided to quit MAIN.

Escaping the Corporate Trap

Leaving wasn’t simple. Perkins’s resignation in 1980 required careful diplomacy—you never simply walked away from the corporatocracy. He disguised his departure as a desire to write and work independently, soothing suspicions. But even outside MAIN, the system kept pulling him back. Corporations offered “consulting retainers” that amounted to hush money; threats alternated with bribes to ensure his silence. Eventually, he accepted one such offer from Stone & Webster, earning a hefty salary for doing virtually nothing—as long as he avoided writing about his past. It was both a payoff and a prison.

Atonement Through Action

Convinced that redemption required new purpose, he founded Independent Power Systems (IPS) in 1982, an alternative energy company designed to prove clean business models could thrive. Though initially idealistic, IPS succeeded partly thanks to his old connections—an irony Perkins acknowledges with unease. Later, his humanitarian work with Ecuadorian tribes and environmental groups gave him genuine meaning. Yet even these efforts couldn’t erase his guilt. The terrorist attacks of September 11, which he experienced from the Ecuadorian rainforest, finally shattered his silence. The cycle of exploitation he once advanced had come full circle, sparking violence against the very empire that created it. Determined to confess, he began writing the book that would become his act of penance.

Perkins’s later chapters connect his personal story to the twenty-first century, showing how the corporatocracy evolved into a self-sustaining global machine. The same forces that shaped his career—debt, privatization, and deception—continued molding world events. From Bush-era Iraq contracts for Bechtel and Halliburton to Venezuela’s attempts at independence under Hugo Chávez, the pattern persists: create dependence, punish resistance, and brand it as freedom.

From Panama to Iraq

Perkins shows how economic strategies merge with military interventions when financial manipulation fails. The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama to remove Noriega and the two wars in Iraq exemplify this. Bechtel executives like George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger—once architects of the Saudi deals—later reemerged as bidders for postwar reconstruction contracts. The same network of elites profits regardless of outcomes. Perkins calls this the new imperial model: first the EHMs, then the jackals, then the armies, all serving corporate interests disguised as public duty.

Debt, Dollars, and Collapse

He warns that the empire’s foundation—debt leveraged by an unbacked dollar—is ultimately unsustainable. The U.S. prints money unrestrained, financing wars and deficits through global confidence in its currency. Should nations like China or oil producers switch to the euro, the system could unravel. True to his earlier warnings, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela remain trapped in debt cycles that destroy rainforests and cultures for oil extraction. “It is not a conspiracy,” he insists. “It is the result of a system that rewards greed.”

A Call to Conscience

In his epilogue, Perkins shifts from confession to invitation. He urges readers to pierce the veneer of media controlled by conglomerates like GE, Disney, and Viacom, to rethink “economic growth” as a moral measure, and to live consciously as consumers and citizens. His message mirrors the indigenous wisdom he learned from the Amazon: the world is as you dream it. Change begins with awareness—recognizing the hidden costs of comfort and the unseen consequences of prosperity. Only by awakening, as Jefferson and Paine once roused colonial America, can modern citizens reclaim their moral independence from empire. Perkins’s confession, then, is more than personal—it is a mirror held up to us all.