DISAPPOINTMENT, melodrama, and a faint glimmer of hope. The ingredients of the latest instalment of Argentina’s legal stand-off with its “hold-out” bondholders were painfully familiar. The disappointment came late on July 30th, when Argentina entered into default for the eighth time in its history (see chart). The melodrama came courtesy of Axel Kicillof, the economy minister, railing against Thomas Griesa, the New York court judge whose ruling precipitated this moment. And the hope is that a settlement remains possible.
The country’s previous default, when it reneged on $81 billion in debt in 2001, is the source of its latest one. Most of its creditors exchanged their defaulted debt for new securities in two restructurings that took place in 2005 and 2010. But a few creditors took a different path. They scooped up the cheap defaulted debt in order to chase payment of full principal plus interest in the New York courts, under whose law the...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1ACNed0
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