Revisiting Sovereign Bankruptcy

Sovereign debt crises occur regularly and often violently. Yet there is no legally and politically recognized procedure for restructuring the debt of bankrupt sovereigns. Procedures of this type have been periodically debated, but so far been rejected, for two main reasons. First, countries have been reluctant to give up power to supranational rules or institutions, and creditors and debtors have felt that there were sufficient instruments for addressing debt crises at hoc. Second, fears that making debt easier to restructure would raise the costs and reduce the amounts of sovereign borrowing in many countries. This was perceived to be against the interests of both the providers of both creditors and major borrowers. This report argues that both the nature and our understanding of sovereign debt problems have changed, over the course of the last decade, in a direction that creates a much stronger case for an orderly sovereign bankruptcy regime today than ten years ago. Pre-crisis policy mistakes are now recognized to be a much more severe problem for borrowing countries than the costs or limited availability of private financing. Recent court rulings – particularly a recent U.S. ruling that gives holdout creditors that decline a restructuring offer the right to interfere with payments to the creditors that accept such an offer. This will complicate efforts to resolve future debt crises on an ad hoc basis. Finally, sovereign debt crises are no longer just a problem in emerging markets, but a core concern in advanced countries as well – particularly in the Euro area. If the Euro is to survive, this will require both better ways to resolve debt crises and stronger, market-based incentives that prevent debt problems from occurring in the first place. To address these problems, policy proposals are presented at two levels: for the Euro area, and globally. A Euro area sovereign debt restructuring regime could be developed by amending the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). This would both restrict the scope for lending to highly indebted countries without also restructuring their debts, and protect Euro area members receiving ESM financial assistance from legal action by holdout creditors. At the global level, a number of proposals are discussed, ranging from a coordinated introduction of aggregate collective action clauses that would allow a supermajority of bondholders across all bonds to amend bond payment terms to an amendment of the IMF articles that would limit the legal remedies of holdouts when a debt restructuring proposal has been accepted both by a majority of creditors and endorsed by the IMF

Getting to Bail-in: Effects of Creditor Participation in European Bank Restructuring

The declared intention of policy makers is that future bank restructuring should be conducted through bail-in rather than bail-out. Over the past years there have been a few cases of European bank restructuring where bail-in was implemented. This paper exploits these events to investigate the market reactions of stock prices and credit default swap (CDS) spreads of other European banks in order to gauge the evolving expectation that bail-in will indeed become the new regime. We find evidence of increased CDS spreads and falling stock prices after bail-in most notably after the events in Cyprus. We also find that bail-in expectations seem to depend on the sovereign s strength, i. e., reactions are stronger for banks in countries with little fiscal space for bail-out. Conversely, bail-out expectations seem to have hardly declined in fiscally stronger countries, such as Germany

No Smoking Gun: Private Shareholders, Governance Rules and Central Bank Financial Behavior

Das vorliegende Manuskript untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen Regeln zur finanziellen Unabhängigkeit von Zentralbanken und deren Finanzkraft. Wir studieren die Regeln und Bilanzdaten von 35 Zentralbanken in der OECD mit dem Ziel herauszuarbeiten, ob die Eigentümerstruktur der Bank (privat oder staatlich geführt), ihre Gewinnverteilungsregeln, Besteuerungsgesetze, Rückstellungsregeln und andere Bilanzierungsregeln die Höhe von Gewinnen, deren Verteilung, sowie die Höhe der Reserven beeinflusst

Getting to bail-in: Effects of creditor participation in European Bank restructuring

[Introduction ...]This paper is structured as follows. The next chapter outlines the selected bail-in cases and formulates the hypotheses regarding expected market reactions. Chapter 3 covers the methodology. We introduce our identification procedure for the event selection, comment on the data sample and describe our empirical model. The fourth chapter contains the results for the bail-in events in chronological order, while chapter 5 provides a robustness analysis. Chapter 6 summarizes and concludes.Background Paper for the German Council of Economic Experts, October 31, 201

Hände weg von Mindestlöhnen

Mindestlohn, Niedriglohn, Arbeitsplatz, Beschäftigungseffekt, Schwarzarbeit, Schattenwirtschaft, Ordnungspolitik, Arbeitslosigkeit, Arbeitsmarkt, Reform, Dumping, Arbeitnehmer, Armut, Humankapital, Arbeitsangebot, Sozialstaat, Deutschland

Reducing systemic relevance: A proposal

This paper presents a proposal for a regulatory regime aimed at reducing systemic risk effectively and internationally. Systemic relevance should be internalized with a levy (or tax), the level of which (or tax rate) rises with the systemic relevance of an institution (Pigouvian taxation). The levy should be complemented by a Systemic Risk Fund which is endowed with control rights, in particular early intervention and resolution powers. The Systemic Risk Fund should be funded by the proceeds from the levy; if the Fund reaches a certain threshold size, the continuing flow of contributions is distributed to the government(s). Systemic Risk Funds implemented on the global, European, and national level would solve the issue mitigating risks also cross-border and provide a framework for burden-sharing

Reforming the international financial system

Against the backdrop of the present crisis this Forum is dedicated to the discussion of measures to prevent future breakdowns of the global economy. Daniel Gros, Ulrich Klüh and Beatrice Weder di Mauro regard as the biggest flaw in the existing structures the lack of an institution that has the information, expertise and impartiality that would enable it to swiftly identify and frankly communicate emerging risks to the global financial system and the world economy. They present a proposal that aims at placing the IMF in a position to play this part. The paper by Philip Lane focuses on how reforms in the governance of the global financial system may alter the incentives facing those emerging market economies that have opted to run large and globally inefficient current account surpluses as insurance against the risks of disruptions in capital flows to these economies

Whither growth in central and eastern Europe? Policy lessons for an integrated Europe

In this Blueprint, Bruegel Resident Fellows Zsolt Darvas, Jean Pisani-Ferry, André Sapir and their co-authors Torbjörn Becker, Daniel Daianu, Vladimir Gligorov, Michael A Landesmann, Pavle Petrovic, Dariusz K. Rosati and Beatrice Weder di Mauro argue that in view of the depth of integration in Europe, the development model of the central, eastern and south-eastern Europe (CESEE) region, despite its shortcomings, should be preserved. But it should be reformed, with major implications for policymaking both at national and EU levels. If so, what are the required changes? Bruegel and The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) cooperated to form this expert group of economists from various European countries to research these issues.

Was the ICO boom just a sideshow of the Bitcoin and Ether Momentum?

We investigate whether the market for ICOs in 2017–2018 and 2021 showed signs of contagion from prices of Bitcoin and Ether. During phases of optimism, ICO daily returns display low correlations with those of Bitcoin or Ether. But when the bubble bursts, correlations jump to very high levels, signaling that the ICO market becomes a sideshow of the cryptocurrency dynamics. We demonstrate that this high correlation was not present during the Nasdaq bubble in the 1990s, signaling that the price dynamics of digital tokens seems to be driven by a common factor, much more than in previous bubbles