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Full-Text Articles in Law
Building A Better Seating Chart For Sovereign Restructurings, Anna Gelpern
Building A Better Seating Chart For Sovereign Restructurings, Anna Gelpern
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Every sovereign debt restructuring in recent memory has wrestled with the problem of inter-creditor equity. Governments have discriminated among creditors in ways that were hard to predict and often were not revealed until after a debt default. In contrast, debts of firms, individuals and even localities are ranked in order of priority established by contract and statute. This ranking is known at borrowing, generally corresponds to the order of repayment in bankruptcy liquidation, and helps define the creditors' relative bargaining power in reorganization. Without a bankruptcy backstop, most debts of national governments are legally equal. Yet in practice, sovereign immunity …
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 …