[4][5] As an economist, Weisbrot has opposed privatization of the United States Social Security system and has been critical of neoliberal globalization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

[9] Weisbrot has been described as the "intellectual architect"[10][11][12][13] behind the unsuccessful[14][15] Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela which was spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

Beginning in 2001, Weisbrot challenged the prevailing consensus on the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression, arguing that IMF-supported austerity was counter-productive and that the country needed to devalue its currency in order to recover.

After the Argentine government defaulted on its debt at the end of 2001, and allowed the currency to float against the dollar at the beginning of 2002, Weisbrot continued to argue against what he called harmful attempts by the IMF to influence policy in the post-default period.

[22] Articles in The New York Times,[23] USA Today,[24] and The Washington Post[25] described Weisbrot as supportive of the policies implemented during Hugo Chávez's presidency.

[26] In 2013, Weisbrot praised the Venezuelan government for its gains in poverty, real income, employment, healthcare, and education, and said that the possibility of hyperinflation was "very remote", that economic problems were "not likely" and that "Venezuela has sufficient reserves".

"[28] Weisbrot stated that he "could not prove those excess deaths were the result of sanctions, but said the increase ran parallel to the imposition of the measures and an attendant fall in oil production".

[28] A US State Department spokesperson said that, "as the writers themselves concede, the report is based on speculation and conjecture"[28] while Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, representative to the Inter-American Development Bank by the US-supported administration of Juan Guaidó,[29] said that the analysis was flawed because it made invalid assumptions about Venezuela based on a different country, Colombia, that the analysis failed to rule out other explanations and that it failed to correctly account for PDVSA finances.

[35] Weisbrot claims that the European Central Bank is less accountable to EU citizens than the Federal Reserve in the United States and was unable or unwilling to replicate the Fed's recover measures of quantitative easing and a prolonged 0% interest rate.

[36] Weisbrot makes the case that the EU and the European Monetary Union are ideologically different organizations, with the more conservative EMU subjecting low-income member countries to the same policies the IMF has imposed outside of Europe.

He also advocated for the position that the European Central Bank undertake quantitative easing, citing the success of the Federal Reserve's actions in the United States.

[49] In an interview, Weisbrot described the book as critiquing the bad macroeconomic policies often imposed by European authorities, who are ultimately unaccountable to the citizens of the sovereign states that they represent.