Era of the Holdout Is Raising the Cost of Sovereign Default

(Bloomberg) -- Going broke just ain’t what it used to be.

In defaults of yesteryear, countries could bank on immunity as they reneged their obligations in peace. These days they’re ending up in costly legal quagmire like never before, according to a working paper published by the European Central Bank on Wednesday.

The trend is strengthening the power of creditors, especially hedge funds, and significantly raising the cost of default for debtors, the paper found. Argentina’s decade-long debacle with hedge-fund holdouts is a case in point, showing how court disputes can bind the hand of an issuer for years.

“In recent decades, the legal standards of sovereign immunity have gradually eroded in global financial centers,” wrote Julian Schumacher, Christoph Trebesch, and Henrik Enderlein, who authored the paper. “Sovereign debt lawsuits have become larger, less likely to be settled early on, and more likely to involve attempts to attach sovereign assets abroad.”

Half of debt restructurings have resulted in litigation in recent years, according to the study, up from just 5 percent in the 1980s. The value of such obligations has climbed and it takes longer to resolve disputes as distressed debt funds get more confident about reaping returns.

Unlike private corporations that undergo insolvency procedures, defaulting governments can’t be liquidated and to this day there is no supranational legal authority to enforce repayment, the report said.

One silver lining is that steps are already being taken to reverse the trend through clauses in bond prospectuses that discourage creditors from trying to litigate, the researchers wrote. Law firms representing sovereign defaulters are also getting smarter as they accumulate experience in similar cases, they said.

The study analyzed 158 litigation cases against 34 defaulting sovereigns between 1976 and 2010 initiated in the U.S. and U.K.

To contact the reporters on this story: Marton Eder in Budapest at meder4@bloomberg.net, Piotr Skolimowski in Frankfurt at pskolimowski@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ven Ram at vram1@bloomberg.net, Natasha Doff, Sid Verma

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