Oxford Business Law Blog

Italy has €2.4 trillion of debt. Should it ever find itself in pressing need of restructuring it, traditional avenues for sovereign restructurings could not be used because of a number of factors...

Sovereign nations urgently need help in resolving unsustainable debt burdens. The median public debt of the sixty low-income developing countries increased from 33.5% of GDP in 2013 to 47% of GDP in...

Some years ago, when the US was about to hit its legally-prescribed debt ceiling and potentially default, a group of legislators had an idea. They proposed that if the government hit the debt limit,...

In ‘Pari Passu Undone: Game-Changing Decisions for Sovereigns in Distress’, which appears in Issue No. 3 of the ‘Cleary Gottlieb Emerging Markets Restructuring Journal’, published by Cleary Gottlieb...

Contracts with states are an omnipresent feature of the global financial system, underlying all sovereign debt obligations. It may therefore come as a surprise that, until recently, the English...

In contrast to corporations or private individuals, States in financial distress are confronted with a unique legal predicament. In the absence of a bankruptcy procedure, sovereign borrowers must...

A new and influential economic literature places much of the blame for the global financial crisis on so-called ‘safe assets,’ debt contracts that investors treat as if they had very low risk...