Debt: Distressed exchanges misfire as magic bullets

Exchanges might prove temporary fixes rather than permanent solutions.

One hundred companies were forced to undertake debt exchanges last year. Given the scale of the bank liquidity crisis, and the doom-laden default predictions that were made at the end of 2008, that figure might seem to be relatively low. Indeed, although distressed exchanges accounted for roughly 35% of total global defaults in 2009 most of them took place in the first half of the year. The sharp improvement in sentiment in mid-2009 enabled the pace of exchanges to slow dramatically.

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