How should the contingent liabilities of a sovereign be treated in a general restructuring of the debts of that sovereign? This question has played only a minor role in past sovereign debt restructurings because the size of such contingent liabilities has in most cases been small. In recent...

Last Friday, the European leaders trespassed on consecrated ground by putting insured depositors in Cypriot banks in harm's way. They had other options, none of them pleasant but some less ominous than the one they settled on

The Eurozone official sector has declared that the belated restructuring of Greek bonds held by private sector creditors in 2012 was a “unique and exceptional” event, never, ever to be repeated in any other Eurozone country. Maybe so. But if this assurance proves in time to be as fragile as...

The Eurozone debt crisis is entering its third year. The original objective of the official sector's response to the crisis -- containment -- has failed. All of the countries of peripheral Europe are now in play; three of them (Greece, Ireland and Portugal) operate under full official sector...

Perhaps Greece - a country with a debt to GDP already approaching 150 percent and set to move even higher - avoids a debt restructuring. Perhaps not. What are the possible scenarios if Greece cannot return to the capital markets to refinance this gargantuan debt stock once its EU/IMF bailout...

Plan A for addressing the Greek debt crisis has taken the form of a €110 billion financial support package for Greece announced by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund on May 2, 2010. A significant part of that €110 billion, if and when it is disbursed, will be used to...

Sovereign debt problems were once thought to be a third world affliction. They still are. But as events of the last two years have shown, undisciplined sovereign borrowing - and the complacent lending that it requires - is not exclusively a third world problem. For the first time in living...