Ties that bind and blur: financialization and the evolution of sovereign debt as private contract

Giselle Datz ()
Additional contact information
Giselle Datz: Virginia Tech

Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 2021, vol. 2, issue 3, 571-587

Abstract: Abstract The rich scholarship on the politics and finance of sovereign debt tends to take for granted debt’s most basic form: as a private contract. Nevertheless, legal challenges have been central to the contemporary evolution of sovereign debt dynamics thanks to litigating strategies rendered possible by — mostly standard — contractual stipulations in international sovereign bonds. By using a debt-as-private-contract lens, the paper highlights how exposed sovereign debtors present themselves to these global transactions, how foreign sovereign bond contracts anchor otherwise footloose finance in particular jurisdictions, and how contractual changes sparked by outlier cases of protracted litigation or recent turbulence in debt exchanges have been key to global efforts to reform debt governance around market-based parameters. The legal battle between Argentina and its holdout creditors in US courts is analyzed here to illustrate these dynamics given its significance in sparking contractual revisions. Ultimately, it is clear that credit and contract are inextricably linked. Contractual evolution is revealing of the legal risks taken on by sovereign debtors and their creditors in private markets. The cost of debt hence may go beyond relatively predictable financial calculations.

Keywords: Sovereign debt; Financialization; Law; Debt restructuring; Contract; Sovereign immunity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43253-021-00058-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:revepe:v:2:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s43253-021-00058-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43253

DOI: 10.1007/s43253-021-00058-z

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Evolutionary Political Economy is currently edited by Wolfram Elsner

More articles in Review of Evolutionary Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().