Global Investing

What’s Argentina’s Plan B?

President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has said she will sell the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, if need be, to keep paying creditors who agreed to restructure the country’s debts.  But it may not come to that. Warning: this is a complicated saga with very interesting twists.

A pair of hedge fund litigants demanding $1.3 billion in payments and a New York court are making it hard for Kirchner to keep paying international bondholders. But she might contemplate asking those existing creditors to swap into Argentine law bonds, to which the writ of the New York court will not extend.

First some background. Argentina is due to pay bond coupons this week and in June. Looks like the hedge funds will decline the payment proposal Argentina made last week; this could lead to a default.

Most investors reckon this week’s payment is safe and that the crash will fall in June.  Argentina pleaded in the NY court that its own laws prohibit it from paying more to the hedge funds than it pays other creditors. Out of court it is less polite, calling the two hedge funds vultures. See here for more.

So, back to a putative Plan B. Deputy President Amado Boudou said this weekend Argentina would find a way to pay the exchange creditors irrespective of the outcome of the court hearing. That has supported bond prices. But it also suggests he may resort to local law bonds. That option, in principle, may look attractive to creditors who might otherwise find themselves holding defaulted debt again. In reality, the switch may be tough to do. Why? Here’s what Stuart Culverhouse, head of research at Exotix in London says:

Argentina squares off today in a U.S. Appeals court with the so-called holdout creditors who are demanding $1.3 billion in payments on defaulted bonds. A decision will probably take a few days but supporters of both sides have been mustering.

Emails have been pouring into journalists’ inboxes thick and fast from the Argentine Task Force, a lobby group that wants Argentina to settle with bondholders and identifies its goal as “pursuing a fair reconciliation of of the Argentine debt default”.  And yesterday, a noisy pots-and-pans protest was held outside the London offices of Elliot Associates (the parent company of one of the two hedge fund litigants)  by groups supporting Argentina in its battle against those it terms “vulture funds”.  Nick Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, a group that calls for cancelling poor countries’ debts, says:

If the vulture funds are allowed to extract their pound of flesh from Argentina today, we will see a proliferation of vulture funds in Europe tomorrow.