This is Planet Money from NPR.

In 1982, economist Miguel Messe Macher was just a little kid growing up in Mexico City.

So he only remembers a tiny bit about a painful time in his region's history, a period

that came to be known as the Latin American debt crisis.

Yeah, I was 10 years old at the time.

I remember hearing the news on my parents being very worried about how things were going

going.

Miguel's parents were worried about losing their jobs.

And if the banks failed, they're savings.

Because the economy was falling apart.

At the heart of the Latin American debt crisis was, you guessed it, debt.

Throughout the 1970s, it was cheap to borrow money.

And so countries like Mexico borrowed a lot of US dollars to build stuff that they'd always

wanted, like infrastructure to build up their oil production, new roads, bridges.

But when the US started experiencing high inflation, this is going to sound a little familiar,

the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates up a lot.

That made it hard for countries like Mexico to pay back their dollar debts.

It also meant that the peso was becoming worth less and less against the dollar.

Things like foreign imports were getting much more expensive.

At the time, the 10-year-old Miguel was just getting into rock music.

He remembers this historic macroeconomic event as basically destroying his record collection.

So I was getting into David Bowie records, for example.

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