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:

If you’re an emerging market borrower, it seems like it’s a great time for sorting out those old troublesome debts as pumped-up yield appetite in the fixed income universe encourages another bout of selective amnesia among creditors and bond investors.

Serial defaulter Ivory Coast met investors in London this week, next stop New York later today, to discuss a new schedule for missed coupons on its $2.3 billion bond due 2032.

The West African country defaulted on the bond early last year during political unrest which later broke into civil war. That bond was launched only in 2010 as a restructuring of previous debt on which Ivory Coast defaulted in 2000. If that isn’t confusing enough, the 2000 default was of  U.S.-underwritten Brady debt, which  itself was a repackaging…

Belize’s so-called superbond has not proved to be a super investment proposition.

The country has set out proposals on how it might restructure the bond, which bundled together several old debts (hence its name) and the ideas have been greeted with horror by investors. Essentially, the government wants to reduce the principal of the bond by almost half while extending the maturity by 13 years, according to one of the proposals.  Interest rates on the issue, at 8.5 percent this year, could be cut to a flat 3.5 percent. Or investors could accept a 1 percent rate that steps up to 4 percent after 2019.

Markets had been expecting a restructuring ever since Prime Minister Dean Barrow said in February the country could not afford to keep up debt repayments. The bond duly fell after his comments but picked up a bit in recent months after Barrow assured investors the restructuring would be amicable.  Investors holding the bond are now nursing year-to-date losses of 24 percent, according to JP Morgan.