No, Reuters quota solo una parte, neanche fosse la gazzetta dello sport. L'intervento di Bini è coerente con i precedenti e naturalmente le parti più interessanti vengono omesse più o meno liberamente.
Third, the best way to avoid triggering speculative attacks against the member states is to link the financial support provided to countries to the latter’s ability to repay, in particular to debt sustainability. There should be no automatic mechanism linking financial support to debt restructuring, because it would attract speculative pressure and precipitate a crisis, even for countries that are solvent.
This raises the issue of how to deal with countries that are not in a position to repay all their debt. Such a possibility cannot be excluded. Again, the experience of the IMF shows that there have been cases of debt restructuring associated with Fund programmes, even though debt restructuring is not considered in the Articles of Agreement of the IMF. Out of 113 IMF support programmes over the last 20 years, only 19 countries defaulted or restructured their debts. The countries which went through such action – Algeria, Argentina, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominican republic, Ecuador, Gabon, Grenada, Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Seychelles, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe – have characteristics which are not very similar to euro area members.
In all these cases restructuring was done on a case-by-case basis, depending on the specific circumstances. It is suggested by some that precise rules and conditions for debt restructuring should be attached to the creation of the new European mechanism, with a view to achieve an orderly restructuring. In my view this is “unnecessary, undesirable, and unlikely”, to quote a recent Staff paper by the IMF.
It is unnecessary because experience shows that restructuring can take place even without international norms and without the IMF being given specific powers in this field. It is undesirable because there is a risk that norms designed at addressing problems of the past are not any more valid for complex financial systems and may even aggravate the situation. Most crises of the past had to deal mainly with foreign creditors of developing countries. In advanced economies the restructuring of the public debt would have to involve a much larger number of financial assets and liabilities, including those of the domestic banking system vis-à-vis residents and non residents. It can be easily seen that there can hardly be anything “orderly” in such a process.
Attempts to work on this issue should certainly not be discouraged. The IMF experience in this field is again telling. There studies and discussions on the design of a mechanism for Sovereign Debt Restructuring took much effort and lasted several years. The result was intellectually interesting but ultimately not agreed, neither by the sovereign states neither by financial market participants. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try again. But we should be aware that calling for an orderly debt restructuring mechanism sounds nice and is costless. Designing and implementing it is somewhat different, and has not been done yet, like many other nice catchwords which have attracted our intellectual interest in the past.
Some work can be done, and has been done, in developing mechanisms which make it easier for creditors and debtors to agree on revising the contractual terms. Substantial work has been done for instance on collective action clauses, which set minimum thresholds for debtor representation needed to agree on a restructuring. These mechanisms exist currently in many national laws. It might be more promising and pragmatic to further explore this avenue.