The current approach to resolving sovereign debt crises does not work: sovereign debt restructurings come too late and do too little. Though they impose enormous costs on societies, these restructurings are often not deep enough to provide the conditions for economic recovery (as illustrated by...

The current approach to resolving sovereign debt crises does not work: sovereign debt restructurings come too late and address too little. Though unresolved debt crises impose enormous costs on societies, many recent restructurings have not been deep enough to provide the conditions for economic...

Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Martin Guzman, Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz -- General issues of sovereign debt restructuring -- Fixing sovereign debt restructuring / Martin Guzman and Joseph E. Stiglitz -- Sovereign debt of developing countries : overview of trends and policy...

In this comment, we take a helicopter tour of the history of notions of "equality" and "justice" in sovereign debt restructuring in particular, and in the division of property more generally, and show that these concerns have existed for centuries, if not millennia. We argue that the issue at...