Leadership Quote by Rodrigo Rato

Rato’s line lands like a bureaucratic victory lap, but the phrasing gives away the politics under the policy. “I mean” and “big, big effort” aren’t the clipped language of a technocrat; they’re the softer, conversational padding of someone trying to make a contested decision sound like common sense. Debt relief is framed not as a hard-won concession extracted by activists, governments, and moral pressure, but as something “the world” generously chose to do. That vague subject is doing a lot of work: it dissolves responsibility. No lenders, no IMF conditionality, no geopolitics, no creditor states. Just a benevolent planet.

The key subtext is legitimacy. By emphasizing the “effort to forget debt,” Rato is recasting write-offs as sacrifice, not accounting. “Forget” is a telling euphemism: it suggests closure and forgiveness rather than the reality that much of this debt was widely recognized as unpayable, politically destabilizing, or in some cases tainted by corruption and Cold War-era lending. The moral ledger gets rewritten so the creditors are the protagonists.

Then comes the carefully limited promise: debt relief “has given good chances” to escape poverty. Not guarantees, not restitution, not structural change - chances. It’s a rhetorical hedge that anticipates criticism: if poverty persists, responsibility shifts back to the debtor country’s governance, reforms, and “use” of the opportunity.

Context matters: Rato, as a high-level European politician with deep ties to global economic institutions, speaks from inside the architecture that designed both the debt traps and the exits. The quote is an attempt to fix the narrative: debt relief wasn’t charity or embarrassment; it was enlightened stewardship, and it should be remembered that way.