News Topic: Sovereign Debt

Paul Krugman had a piece in yesterday’s NYT about the lunacy in the stock market, where a bankrupt company like Hertz is merrily issuing new stock ( here ).  Matt Levine of Bloomberg has similarly, and hilariously, discussed the Hertz case and other ... Read full article

Italian sovereign borrowing is increasing, as the costs of dealing with a stalled economy and the pandemic build.  A recipe for disaster?  Turns out that Italian yields (and spreads with the risk free benchmark rate) are actually going down; down in the ... Read full article

Argentina's capacity to trigger outrage in sovereign debt circles is to behold. After nine defaults, thousands of lawsuits, and enough intrigue and screaming matches to break Big Data, wouldn't you think that someone somewhere would learn to ... Read full article

By Mitu Gulati and Mark Weidemaier ... Read full article

Lest anyone thought they could quarantine or protest in peace, no such luck in the sovereign debt world. ... Read full article

Mitu Gulati and Mark Weidemaier We have been working on building a dataset of sovereign bonds and their contract terms. Given the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic--close to 100 countries have approached the IMF for assistance--we would not have ... Read full article

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati The sovereign debt world has been debating how to design an emergency debt standstill for the poorest nations, so that they can devote scarce resources to public health rather than debt service. As we’ve discussed on this ... Read full article

Mitu and I posted some preliminary thoughts about the defense of necessity, which might be raised as a basis for allowing sovereign borrowers to defer debt service during the crisis. I wanted to follow up on some of the open issues. A few are technical, ... Read full article

So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says States should be able to file for bankruptcy, to get out of their pension obligations. He'd rather that than give them a federal bailout, given current conditions. ... Read full article

Mark Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati ... Read full article

A sovereign debt standstill might not cure COVID-19, but it sure seems like the one thing we can all agree on. ... Read full article

Today is the final day of my Duke-NYU sovereign debt seminar with Steve Choi and Lee Buchheit, and that makes me sad.  The students have delivered in spades this term, notwithstanding the disruptions to their lives as a result of corona drama. I ... Read full article

Mark Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati We posted earlier about Lebanon’s befuddling fiscal agency agreement. Understanding what exactly the modification provision in this contract means to say is key because Lebanon is in the process of trying to restructure its ... Read full article

Tomorrow is the first of the two days when the students in my international debt class (with Steve Choi and Lee Buchheit) present their final papers to a group of outside experts.  The students have come up with some intriguing ideas for the ... Read full article

A few weeks ago, Mark Weidemaier and I blogged about Lebanon’s unusual pari passu clause and Collective Action Clauses. ... Read full article

Concentrating on just about anything during these days of the coronavirus, let alone academic writing, has been a trifle difficult these.  A splendid new paper on Boer Bonds by Kim Oosterlinck and Marie Van Gansbeke ( here ) did, however, get me focused ... Read full article

Further to Mitu's post about the European Central Bank's bond-buying bellyache, let us linger on the rationale for the 33.33% limit on the central bank's holdings of a euro area sovereign bond series.  ... Read full article

Answer: No ( This post borrows heavily from the ideas of my co author, Ugo Panizza, of the international economics department of the Graduate Institute in Geneva ). ... Read full article