Sovereign default

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A sovereign default is the failure or refusal of the government of a sovereign state to pay back its debt in full when due. Cessation of due payments (or receivables) may either be accompanied by that government's formal declaration that it will not pay (or only partially pay) its debts (repudiation), or it may be unannounced. A credit rating agency will take into account in its gradings capital, interest, extraneous and procedural defaults, and failures to abide by the terms of bonds or other debt instruments.

Countries have at times escaped some of the real burden of their debt through inflation. This is not "default" in the usual sense because the debt is honored, albeit with currency of lesser real value. Sometimes governments devalue their currency. This can be done by printing more money to apply toward their own debts, or by ending or altering the convertibility of their currencies into precious metals or foreign currency at fixed rates. Harder to quantify than an interest or capital default, this often is defined as an extraneous or procedural default (breach) of terms of the contracts or other instruments.

If potential lenders or bond purchasers begin to suspect that a government may fail to pay back its debt, they may demand a high interest rate in compensation for the risk of default. A dramatic rise in the interest rate faced by a government due to fear that it will fail to honor its debt is sometimes called a sovereign debt crisis. Governments may be especially vulnerable to a sovereign debt crisis when they rely on financing through short-term bonds, since this creates a maturity mismatch between their short-term bond financing and the long-term asset value of their tax base.

They may also be vulnerable to a sovereign debt crisis due to currency mismatch: if few bonds in their own currency are accepted abroad, and so the country issues mainly foreign currency-denominated bonds, a decrease in the value of their own currency can make it prohibitively expensive to pay back those bonds (see original sin).^[1]

Since a sovereign government, by definition, controls its own affairs, it cannot be obliged to pay back its debt.^[2] Nonetheless, governments may face severe pressure from lending countries. In a few extreme cases, a major creditor nation, before the establishment of the UN Charter Article 2 (4) prohibiting use of force by states, made threats of war or waged war against a debtor nation for failing to pay back debt to seize assets to enforce its creditor's rights. For example, in 1882, the United Kingdom invaded Egypt. Other examples are the United States' "gunboat diplomacy" in Venezuela in the mid-1890s and the United States occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915.^[3] Today, a government that defaults may be widely excluded from further credit; some of its overseas assets may be seized;^[3] and it may face political pressure from its own domestic bondholders to pay back its debt. Therefore, governments rarely default on the entire value of their debt. Instead, they often enter into negotiations with their bondholders to agree on a delay (debt restructuring) or partial reduction of their debt (a 'haircut or write-off'). Some economists have argued that, in the case of acute insolvency crises, it can be advisable for regulators and supranational lenders to preemptively engineer the orderly restructuring of a nation's public debt – also called "orderly default" or "controlled default".^[4][5] In the case of Greece, these economists generally believe that a delay in organising an orderly default would hurt the rest of Europe even more.^[6]

The International Monetary Fund often lends for sovereign debt restructuring. To ensure that funds will be available to pay the remaining part of the sovereign debt, it has made such loans conditional on action such as reducing corruption, imposing austerity measures such as reducing non-profitable public sector services, raising the tax take (revenue) or more rarely suggesting other forms of revenue raising such as nationalization of inept or corrupt but lucrative economic sectors. A recent example is the Greek bailout agreement of May 2010. After the 2008 financial crisis, in order to avoid a sovereign default, Spain and Portugal, among other countries, turned their trade and current account deficits into surpluses.^[7]