The public debt crisis that Eurozone countries have experienced since 2010 has been accompanied by a resurgence of sovereign risk. Greece was obliged to restructure its debt in 2012. The credit position of even the wealthy countries is shakier than at any time since the Great Depression. Now more than ever it is essential to understand sovereign risk because the default of a country, or even its lack of credibility, is bound to jeopardize political stability and weaken the credit standing of all other economic actors. This book reviews and analyzes the different means used to forestall and protect against sovereign defaults. In light of the Eurozone's 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis, this book also emphasizes the roots of sovereign creditworthiness. Chapter 1 establishes a typology of sovereign defaults. A sovereign bankruptcy may take many forms (debt repudiation, moratorium, restructuring, etc.). Chapter 2 presents the different contractual and legal tools used to protect against sovereign defaults. Chapter 3 investigates how some investors have been able to interfere with the debtor's economic policy by insisting that measures be taken to reduce the risk of default in the short and medium term. Such interference can be direct or may be more subtle. There is a specific focus on the conditionality imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Chapter 4 studies the various tools that investors can use to discriminate among borrowers and forecast debt crises (bond yields and spreads as well as ratings provided by Fitch, Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Euromoney Country Risk). Chapter 4 also demonstrates that sovereign debtors must overcome seven types of risk in order to preserve their creditworthiness: natural disaster, geopolitical risk, institutional and political risk, economic risk, monetary and exchange rate risk, fiscal and tax-system risk, and debt-related risk.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Norbert Gaillard is a French economist and independent consultant (norbertgaillard.com). He studied at Sciences Po Paris and Princeton University. He is a Euromoney Country Risk expert and his areas of expertise are public debt and sovereign risk, local government debt and subnational risk, country risk, and credit rating agencies. He has written more than twenty research papers and book chapters on credit risk. Among these, the most important are "The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815-2007" (in NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 2009, University of Chicago Press, 2010), "What Is the Value of Sovereign Ratings?" (German Economic Review, 2014), "Efficient, Commonsense Actions to Foster Accurate Credit Ratings" (Capital Markets Law Journal, 2016), "The Icarus Syndrome: How Credit Rating Agencies Lost Their Quasi Immunity" (Southern Methodist University Law Review, 2018). He has published four books: Les Agences de Notation (La Découverte, Paris, 2010), A Century of Sovereign Ratings (Springer, New York, 2011; also translated into Chinese), When Sovereigns Go Bankrupt (Springer, Cham, 2014), and The Failure of Financial Regulation (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019).

Inhalt
Introduction.- Identifying Sovereign Defaults.- Protecting against Sovereign Defaults.- Preventing Sovereign Defaults.- Anticipating Sovereign Debt Crises.- Conclusion.