News Topic: Sovereign Debt

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati ... Read full article

"Are There Force Majeure Clauses in Italian Sovereign Bonds?" ... Read full article

An article from a couple of days ago in L'Orient-Le Jour ( here ) provides a rare window into the process by which financial and legal advisers are chosen for a sovereign restructuring deal. ... Read full article

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati ... Read full article

Last Saturday evening the Prime Minister of Lebanon announced that the country would not be paying a $1.2 billion Eurobond scheduled to mature today, March 9. As recently as six weeks ago the March 9 bond was trading at 90 cents on the dollar. Today, ... Read full article

My students have been valiantly trying to track down the Fiscal Agency Agreements (FAA) for Lebanon that tie in to the offering documents. Those are crucial for anyone trying to figure out a restructuring strategy for the government, which is one of our ... Read full article

I have long been a fan of both David Skeel's research and him as a person. Not only was his book Debt's Dominion key to some of the earliest research I did on Collective Action Clauses, but he was always willing to answer my stupid questions ... Read full article

For sovereign debt fans, there is a very nice podcast from Bloomberg's Odd Lots that was put up a couple of days ago ( here ).  The title says it all: "How Iraq Pulled Off One of the Biggest Sovereign Debt Restructurings of All Time".  It ... Read full article

Often, the final assignment in my sovereign debt finance class is for the students to try and design a restructuring plan for whatever sovereign is in crisis that year.  This year, we have a number of available candidates: Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, ... Read full article

Inspired by Tracy Alloway's recent piece on antique Chinese bonds ( here ), a group of my students has gone deep down the rabbit hole of the question of how one might recover on them (or, from the Chinese government’s perspective, how one would block ... Read full article

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

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