How Iraq Pulled Off One Of The Biggest Sovereign Debt Restructurings Of All Time
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
There are lots of famous debt crises in history, but the story of Iraq's government debt build-up in the 1980s and subsequent restructuring in the early 2000s is probably one of the most unusual. Iraq transformed from a net creditor to a net borrower in a single decade, tapping a bunch of unusual sources (including funds linked to the CIA) for money to finance war against Iran. All that borrowing eventually culminated in one of the biggest debt restructurings in history. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Simon Hinrichsen, a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics, and the first to trace the build-up of Iraq's debt going back to 1979. He walks us through lessons learned from the Iraq restructuring – including one big missed opportunity in the world of sovereign debt.
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| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
| 0:04.6 | proudly sponsored by National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. |
| 0:07.8 | 2023 marks the 11 year anniversary of our Canada focused event and continues the tradition of providing timely |
| 0:13.8 | insights and actionable strategies. We'll have senior government |
| 0:17.1 | officials from Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well |
| 0:21.9 | as speakers from Northland Power, World Bank, Transolta, and many more. |
| 0:26.0 | Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:45.4 | And I'm Joe Wisenthol. |
| 0:47.2 | Joe, we like to talk about debt, don't we? |
| 0:51.2 | We do. Remember we did last fall we had our on-lod's live performance. I guess or live episode and we had a whole section all about the nature of debt, sovereign debt restructuring, |
| 1:05.8 | things like that. Definitely one of our one of our go-to topics. |
| 1:11.4 | Yes and one of the reasons why I find debt quite fascinating and you sort of touched on it just there is because there's almost like a moral veneer on debt like the issue of who owes what and to whom is almost a moral one. |
| 1:30.0 | I've totally noticed this and I totally agree. I mean there was a story that I |
| 1:34.9 | tweeted out from Bloomberg a couple weeks ago about how you know StubHub it's where |
| 1:40.2 | you could buy tickets for like concerts. Oh yeah. |
| 1:43.2 | And they had this thing on there, they're like |
| 1:45.4 | partnering with some company so that if tickets were too expensive for you, |
| 1:49.1 | you could borrow money to buy them. |
| 1:51.2 | And people just have such a visceral reaction. |
| 1:53.6 | They're like, oh, this is terrible. |
| 1:55.3 | This is outrageous. |
| 1:56.6 | And like, I guess, kind of, but it's so interesting. |
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