News Topic: CreditSlips

There's something really surreal about Donald Trump's pardon of Michael Milken. Trump and Milken were (with Ivan Boesky) the leading symbols of the excesses of capitalism in the 1980s. And here we are today.  It seems that whatever Trump does, ... Read full article

A follow-up on my exchange with Mitu (parts 1 , 2 , 3 , and ... Read full article

The Russian Duma last week adopted on first reading a bill that attempts to solve the biggest problem with the new Russian personal insolvency law , but the bill contains a poison pill provision that will all but kill its effectiveness if the bill makes ... Read full article

The Big Lie just won’t die. The Big Lie, of course, is The Government Made Me Do It theory of the financial crisis, that the housing bubble whose collapse set off the crisis was the product of government policies encouraging affordable home mortgage ... Read full article

As part of the international debt class that I'm teaching this term with Steve and Lee, we spent a couple of sessions discussing the various lawsuits that have been brought in US courts over China's defaulted pre-1949 debt. ... Read full article

There is a subtext to my recent exchange with Mitu ( here , here , and here ) about whether a judgment-holder is bound by a subsequent vote to modify a bond’s payment ter ... Read full article

Mark's post ... Read full article

Mitu’s post from two-days ago frames an important question. An investor holds a defaulted sovereign bond that includes a collective action clause, sues, and gets a final judgment for the full amount of the outstanding principal. Later, a majority of the ... Read full article

(Thanks to Steven Bodzin of REDD Intelligence for flagging this matter; he has an aptly titled piece on this out today “Venezuela Bondholders Seek Judgement Ahead of Collective Action Clause Activation” ). ... Read full article

One of the more fun discussions we have had in my international debt class this term has been the question of whether a clever plaintiff's lawyer might be able to breathe life into defaulted Chinese bonds from the period 1911-1948. (Our thanks to ... Read full article

I shudder even as I write these words, but I’m increasingly fascinated by insurance contracts.  If you are interested in the processes by which standard form contracts evolve – which I am -- then you can’t help but be sucked into this world. Coming from ... Read full article

Following in the footsteps of their mammoth restructuring of Greek Debt in March 2012, Andrew Shutter, Jim Ho, Lee Buchheit, and their team utilized the same "local law advantage" to design the restructuring of the Bajan debt in 2018-19. ... Read full article

Holdout hero Elliott Management, the king of holding out until it gets what it wants, scored itself a nice Christmas bonus. The hedge fund won a long game of chicken with Ireland’s government over junior bonds issued by Anglo Irish Bank by getting its ... Read full article

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati ... Read full article

My international debt class this week discussed the US Supreme Court’s gold clause decisions from 1935; and, in particular, US v. Perry . This is one of my favorite topics, in part because the events that occurred are so surprising to most students (as ... Read full article

Argentina is on the brink of attempting a restructuring of its sovereign debt.  And, of course, that has attracted the birds of prey.  An article in Bloomberg a couple of days ago ( here ) reported that potential holdout creditors had hired expert lawyers ... Read full article

Last year the Washington Post covered Mick Mulvaney's South Carolina land deal gone sour . It was a pretty amazing case that is fantastic for teaching purposes. Mick's moves would have made some of the most sophisticated distressed debt funds ... Read full article

The ideas in this post are drawn from work with Stephen Choi .  Errors are mine. ... Read full article