Sovereign default

Definition

The term sovereign default is generally taken to refer to the failure of a government to comply with its interest payment or debt repayment obligations. That is not a working definition, however, because it is necessary for practical purposes to ignore trivial defaults such as briefly delayed payments, and to make a choice among a range of options such as whether to include distressed exchanges, the agreed rescheduling of debt, or international bail-outs of sovereign debtors - and whether the term is to include domestic as well as foreign creditors, and debts to foreign governments as well as foreign private sector creditors. There is no generally accepted practice concerning those choices.

Overview

Governments have from time to time chosen to stop servicing their debts rather than attempt to raise the necessary money by taxation. In most cases that choice was effectively forced upon the government concerned by a combination of economic and currency crises, and in most cases it was followed by a restructuring agreement between the defaulting government and its creditors, and the resumption of payments. Under the terms of the post-war Bretton Woods agreement, intervention by the International Monetary Fund may be called upon in order to avoid or mitigate the damage done by sovereign default. Since the 1990s, the ability to insure against default by the purchase of credit default swaps has affected the incidence of default and added to the influence of the credit rating agencies.

Post-war sovereign defaults have been confined to emerging market economies, but the increases in national debt brought about by the recession of 2009 have raised the possibility of default by countries with an established market economies, as indicated by a growth in the premiums that have been added to their bond yields.

History

The isolated sovereign defaults that occurred before the 19th century arose mainly from domestic politics or wartime refusal to make payments to enemy creditors. The more numerous defaults of the 19th century were influenced more by international commerce, were concentrated in a few recurring episodes, and tended to infect trading partners. Those of the early twentieth century were mainly associated with the First World War or with the great depression and the operation of the gold standard. Defaults were rare in the post-war years before a concentrated episode that occurred in the early 1980s and another around the turn of the century - both of them associated with the development of deregulation and globalisation.

The development of international financial mobility in the 19th century led to three default episodes, clustered around the 1830s, the 1860s and the 1890s, and mainly associated with the collapse of booms in lending to emerging economies from Britain and France . They were concentrated in Latin America apart from a handful in the then peripheral European countries of Greece, Spain and Portugal. The Latin American defaults of the 1890s were triggered by doubts about Argentina’s economic stability, which led to the collapse of London's Baring Brothers bank, that had underwritten an Argentine bond, and was followed by the abrupt withdrawal of all lending to Latin America and defaults by six other South American countries .

During the inter-war period there were 39 default episodes more than half of which occurred in Latin American countries and 16 of them in Europe. In the course of the Great Depression of the 1930s most European governments defaulted on their debts, following unsuccessful attempts to remain on the gold standard. In 1932, the British Government effectively defaulted by converting its 5% War Loan Bonds into new 3½ % bonds on terms that were unfavourable to their holders, and in 1934 the French government defaulted on repayment of a loan from the United States.

There were over 20 post-war defaults between 1980 and 2007, fewer than half of which occurred in Latin American countries. Increases in international capital mobility had made many Asian countries vulnerable to sudden reversals in capital flows, and the resulting Asian banking crisis had raised investors awareness of the dangers of default and increased the tendency for the contagion of sovereign debt problems. The worst and most far-reaching instances were Russia's 1998 default and Argentina's 2001 default, both of which were associated with failed exchange rate policies. Risk assessments by the credit rating agencies assumed an increasingly important role.

Causes of default

Sovereign default is always the outcome of a government decision that default is preferable to the increase in the tax burden (or the reduction in expenditure) that would be necessary in order to meet its debt obligations. The fiscal policy considerations governing that decision are defined by the arithmetic of sustainability, which determines the necessary budget surplus in terms of the level of national debt as a percentage of GDP, together with the interest rate payable and the GDP growth rate. However, the level of national debt is far from being the sole determinant of default and some established market economies have weathered levels of national debt in excess of 250 percent without default, whereas the governments of developing countries with a history of serial defaults are liable to default again if their national debt exceeds a limit as low as 15 per cent of GDP.

Countries with a record of macroeconomic instability have been shown to be especially prone to default. An unstable situation can arise if investors lose confidence in the issuer of the debt and demand increased interest rates to compensate for what they perceive to be a risk that it may not be repaid. Once started, that can lead to a herding panic similar to a run on a bank. Panics of that sort have not affected any well-established market economy since the war, but they have been a common feature of defaults among the developed economies. Other factors that have been found to make developing countries prone to default are a high foreign component in their debt, low levels of economic growth, inflationary tendencies and political uncertainties.