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Full-Text Articles in Bankruptcy Law
A Process For Politics, Anna Gelpern
A Process For Politics, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
I argue that consistent and public process observance has a distinctly valuable function in sovereign debt restructuring, with no precise equivalent in national insolvency regimes. National regimes reflect the distribution bargains of their enactment, presumptively legitimate and binding. Debtors and creditors allocate insolvency losses in their shadow, with liquidation as a backstop and politics just outside the frame. All else equal, the restructuring process has a harder job with sovereign debt. There is no liquidation backstop and no default distribution scenario. Each crisis resolution episode must allocate losses from scratch among the country’s citizens, foreign and domestic creditors, and other …
Cacs And Doorknobs, Anna Gelpern, Jeromin Zettelmeyer
Cacs And Doorknobs, Anna Gelpern, Jeromin Zettelmeyer
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In response to debt crises, policy makers often feature Collective Action Clauses (CACs) in sovereign bonds among the pillars of international financial architecture. However, the content of official pronouncements about CACs suggests that CACs are more like doorknobs: a process tool with limited impact on the incidence or ultimate outcome of a debt restructuring. We ask whether CACs are welfare improving and, if so, whether they are pillars or doorknobs. The history of CACs in corporate debt suggests that CACs can be good, bad or unimportant depending on their vulnerability to abuse and the available alternatives, including bankruptcy and debt …
Courts And Sovereigns In The Pari Passu Goldmines, Anna Gelpern
Courts And Sovereigns In The Pari Passu Goldmines, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
U.S. federal court rulings against Argentina since 2012 have turned the pari passu clause in sovereign bond contracts into the most promising debt collection tool against immune governments since the days of gunboat diplomacy. The large literature on pari passu (“equal step” in Latin) assumes that the clause had not been used for enforcement before the late 1990s, and that it was first construed by a Belgian court in a case against Peru in the year 2000. The Belgian decision was criticized for wrongly concluding that pari passu promised ratable payment to all holders of Peru’s external debt. A decade …
Sovereign Debt: Now What?, Anna Gelpern
Sovereign Debt: Now What?, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The sovereign debt restructuring regime looks like it is coming apart. Changing patterns of capital flows, old creditors’ weakening commitment to past practices, and other stakeholders’ inability to take over, or coalesce behind a viable alternative, have challenged the regime from the moment it took shape in the mid-1990s. By 2016, its survival cannot be taken for granted. Crises in Argentina, Greece, and Ukraine since 2010 exposed the regime’s perennial failures and new shortcomings. Until an alternative emerges, there may be messier, more protracted restructurings, more demands on public resources, and more pressure on national courts to intervene in disputes …
A Framework For A Formal Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism: The Kiss Principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) And Other Guiding Principles, Charles W. Mooney Jr.
A Framework For A Formal Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism: The Kiss Principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) And Other Guiding Principles, Charles W. Mooney Jr.
All Faculty Scholarship
Given the ongoing work on a multilateral restructuring process for sovereign debt in the UN, consideration of the content and implementation of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) is timely. The framework and content of the SDRM proposed here differs from earlier proposals in several important respects. For the classification and supermajority voting of claims in the approval a restructuring plan, it would mimic the structure and operation of the model collective action clauses (Model CACs) proposed by the International Capital Markets Association. Restructuring under a qualified sovereign debt restructuring law (QSDRL) would be guided by four principles: (i) observe …
Contract Hope And Sovereign Redemption, Anna Gelpern
Contract Hope And Sovereign Redemption, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Sovereign immunity has served as a partial substitute for bankruptcy protection, but it has encouraged a minority of creditors to pursue unorthodox legal remedies with spillover effects far beyond the debtor-creditor relationship. The attempt to enforce Argentina’s pari passu clause in New York is an example of such a remedy, which relies primarily on collateral damage to other creditors and market infrastructure to obtain settlement from a debtor that would not pay. The District Court decision, now on appeal before the Second Circuit, may not make holding out more attractive in future restructurings – but it would make participation less …
Domestic And External Debt: The Doomed Quest For Equal Treatment, Anna Gelpern, Brad Setser
Domestic And External Debt: The Doomed Quest For Equal Treatment, Anna Gelpern, Brad Setser
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Until recently, governments borrowed from domestic residents and foreign investors using very different instruments. Residents bought "domestic debt" - paper denominated in local currency and governed by domestic law. Foreign investors preferred "external debt", which offered foreign currency and foreign law. Because there was virtually no overlap between resident and nonresident holdings, it mattered little that lawyers and economists defined domestic and external debt differently: lawyers focused on features such as governing law and jurisdiction, economists on the holder's residence and currency of denomination. The legal and economic definitions of domestic and external debt were effectively bundled: "domestic debt" meant …