Italy changed its debt contracts, Belize passed new debt legislation, and Taiwan sued Grenada this year, all in response to a string of court rulings in New York that tried to make Argentina pay its debts from its financial crisis in 2001. The court rulings have gone to unprecedented lengths to...

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it...

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world's richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement...

The traditional view of sovereign debt as a relationship between a developing country government and and its foreign private creditors is increasingly out of date. Financial institutions and individuals inside the borrowing countries are are becoming more and more important as creditors to their...

Argentina recently completed the largest sovereign bond restructuring in history. As soon as the government announced the results of its $100 billion tender in March 2005, editorial pages worldwide heralded a new era for sovereign debt, for the emerging markets and, occasionally, for...

Until recently, governments borrowed from domestic residents and foreign investors using very different instruments. Residents bought quot;domestic debtquot; - paper denominated in local currency and governed by domestic law. Foreign investors preferred quot;external debtquot;, which offered...

This article argues that essential information about sovereign debt must be publicly accessible and intelligible. Sovereign debt is a public institution, and sovereign debt statistics are a matter of public interest. For most stakeholders, information about sovereign debt is hard to find, harder...

This essay considers standard-form over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives contracts from an organizational perspective. OTC derivatives contracts are highly standardized and have a peculiar modular structure. Most are drafted by a single trade group, which is not party to the contracts. These...

Modification-proof contracts boost commitment and can help overcome information problems. But when such rigid contracts are ubiquitous, they can function as social suicide pacts, compelling enforcement despite significant externalities. At the heart of the current financial crisis is a contract...

Not long ago, financial markets in most poor and middle-income countries were shallow to nonexistent, and closed to foreigners. Governments often had to rely on risky borrowing abroad; the private sector had even fewer options. But between 1995 and 2005, domestic debt in the emerging markets grew...