Settling Defaults in the Era of Bond Finance

Barry Eichengreen and Richard Portes

No 272, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We scrutinize two strands of received wisdom about debt crises: that which draws a strong contrast between the 1930s and 1980s in extent of default and ease of settlement, and that which attributes the difference to greater government involvement today. Rather than a sharp, dichotomous variable, default in the 1930s was often partial and intermittent. Neither was settlement achieved in a way that readily permitted countries to put the debt crisis behind them. And creditor-country governments were often intimately involved in the process of debt negotiation. We consider a number of additional factors influencing the ease of settlement: (i) institutional features of the lending process; (ii) institutional features of the settlement process; (iii) the role of national divisions within the creditor community; (iv) the influence of global commodity- and credit-market conditions over the process of settlement.

Keywords: Debt Crisis; Debtor Nation; International Debt; Sovereign Borrowing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1988-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=272 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Settling Defaults in the Era of Bond Finance (1988)
Working Paper: Settling Defaults in the Era of Bond Finance (1988)
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:cpr:ceprdp:272

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/ ... pers/dp.php?dpno=272

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().