Join us in Seattle on November 8th for Bloomberg's intelligent automation briefing about transformation in a time of uncertainty. During this special evening event, top business and IT executives will gather to explore ways in which intelligent automation can offset economic

pressures and help organizations thrive by enhancing operational efficiencies and stakeholder

value.

This program is proudly sponsored by IBM. Register at

Bloomberg Live.com slash automation slash radio. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.

And I'm Joe Eisenthal.

Joe, I feel like 2020 has been such an unusual and crazy year with a lot of things going on that there's

actually some pretty important news that hasn't gotten as much attention as it

would normally if it was any other year I think a lot of people would be

reading about this and talking about this at least in the sort of investment industry

yeah it's kind of like how, you know, news you might like put out on a Friday and no one really notices it. It's like all of 2020 is like the Friday news dump because you could put there's so much other stuff to pay attention to

The virus obviously the economic shock and the election that no to really has had the bandwidth for anything else.

Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.

So the event that I'm talking about that I don't think has gotten as much attention as it normally would is basically a debt crisis in Africa and this month let's see we're recording in November so this month

Zambia actually defaulted on some bonds and it's the first sort of

COVID-related default by an African nation and a lot of people expect there will be more even though we've seen some

countries some creditors the G20 agree a few efforts to try to help indebted countries in Africa. There's a G20 debt service

suspension initiative, but even with that aid, people are expecting distress in Africa's debt market to get

probably worse before it gets better. I think you're right like if a

a zombie in debt default would have been the kind of thing they're like oh

let's do an episode on that much earlier but in 2020 yes it's certainly gotten less attention than I think it gets lost.

You know, it's one of those things where I'm sure I even saw headlines on it and I meant to ask more questions in a meeting one day and

...