Waterloo, Ontario – August 15, 2013 – A sovereign debt forum and other incremental, pragmatic proposals to improve sovereign crisis management should be put at the core of the G20 agenda on an ongoing basis, says a new report from The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).
In The Sovereign Debt Forum: Expanding Our Tool Kit for Handling Sovereign Crises, CIGI Senior Fellows Richard Gitlin and Brett House write that a sovereign debt forum (SDF) “would assist in facilitating more predictable, transparent and timely treatments of sovereign crises during future episodes of debt-servicing difficulties” and provide a non-statutory, neutral standing body “to identify lessons from past episodes of sovereign distress, maintain information on sovereign debt and convene stakeholders to engage in confidential discussions at the outset of a sovereign crisis.”
Gitlin and House’s other findings include:
- an SDF would help resolve the existing impasse between proponents of statutory approaches to sovereign debt treatments and market-based approaches, thereby allowing the world to make a meaningful advance in our handling of sovereign crises;
- an SDF would provide a venue to convene and facilitate the work of existing crisis-fighting institutions and it would collaborate closely with them to enhance their effectiveness;
- by facilitating the early and rapid resolution of sovereign distress, an SDF would help minimize the costs of such crises;
- an SDF would complement other proposals for automatic maturity extensions on securitized debt, arbitration and mediation processes, voluntary standstills and improved aggregation in collective action clauses (CACs); and
- the G20 and its member states should be encouraged to set target dates for concerted and concrete action to improve methods for anticipating and responding to sovereign crises, building on work that has already been done. Target dates would galvanize efforts to improve our means of dealing with sovereign crises and would ensure that incremental progress is made prior to the next round of sovereign distress.
To read The Sovereign Debt Forum: Expanding Our Tool Kit for Handling Sovereign Crises or for a free PDF download, please visit: http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2013/8/sovereign-debt-forum-expanding-our-tool-kit-handling-sovereign-crises.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Richard Gitlin is a senior fellow at CIGI and chairman of Gitlin & Company, an advisory firm dealing with corporate and sovereign debt restructurings.
Brett House is a senior fellow at CIGI, as well as a Chazen Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School and a senior fellow at the Jeanne Sauvé Foundation at McGill University.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Declan Kelly, Communications Specialist, CIGI
Tel: 519.885.2444, ext. 7356, Email: [email protected]
The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent, non-partisan think tank on international governance. Led by experienced practitioners and distinguished academics, CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate and generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements. Conducting an active agenda of research, events and publications, CIGI’s interdisciplinary work includes collaboration with policy, business and academic communities around the world. CIGI was founded in 2001 by Jim Balsillie, then co-CEO of Research In Motion (BlackBerry), and collaborates with and gratefully acknowledges support from a number of strategic partners, in particular the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario. For more information, please visit www.cigionline.org.