Tag Archives: Vulture Funds

Just a couple of years ago Argentina’s left of center government was besieged by foreign investors, the hedge funds known as Vulture Funds, that demanded full payment for their bonds acquired at heavily discounted prices in the secondary markets. The New York courts ruled in favor of the Vulture Funds, and Argentina was unable to borrow in international markets, even though during the successive governments of the late Néstor Kirchner and her wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner the country...

Soybean Republic As promised, here are some brief reflections on the situation in Argentina, which I think is not as bad as in Brazil economically or politically, surprisingly, since Argentina had a balance of payments problem that is completely absent in the increasingly chaotic neighbor, and the left actually lost the election, which was not the case of Dilma (a coup was required to defenestrate her). As I suggested in my talk a year ago (for non Spanish speakers go to this text), the...

John Oliver's story on debt collection is very instructive. It looks only at the domestic practices, but these are essentially the same as the ones used by Vulture Funds in international financial markets. [embedded content] So respectable businessmen like Paul Singer, a top GPO contributor that owns the Elliot Vulture Fund that buys debt of developing countries and sues them in New York courts, or the international organizations like the IMF that impose conditionality on poor indebted...

Mainly because of their "expectation that Argentina will settle holdout creditor claims which will result in a lifting of court injunctions and clear the way for Argentina to access international capital markets." Fair enough, access to capital markets would lift the balance of payments constraint, even if the agreement is a complete surrender to the Vultures demands. But the most interesting argument for the improvement in the credit rating is that it results from "economic policy...