Over the past three months, the world of sovereign debt restructuring has Zoom-called and document-shuffled its way to a new “common framework” for debt restructuring beyond the temporary global relief offered during the Covid-19 pandemic. While, sadly, travel and meeting restrictions did not allow for the customary seasonal partying among the sovereign debt tribes, they did exchange the traditional fulsome self-congratulations, if only electronically.
The common framework is intended to lead to a new age of transparency and harmony of term-setting among multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, official lenders such as export guarantee agencies, and private lenders, including banks and bondholders. The intention is to put an end to the queue jumping and secretive side dealing that always bedevils negotiations between problem sovereign borrowers and their international creditors.
That would be great, so we could all move on in an orderly manner to restructure distressed sovereign credits such as Zambia, Lebanon and Sri Lanka, not to mention all the airlines, hotels and so on. The IMF can avoid expensive and dangerous traps such as its Greek and Argentine programmes.