Bankers celebrate as Cavallo buys a little time

Argentina's $29.5 billion sovereign debt exchange deal was a great coup for the banks lead-managing it. Liability management deals are making up for a slowdown in the emerging-market debt business. How much it helped Argentina is less clear. Investors participated for technical reasons, not out of faith that the economy is improving.

       

Executing a multi-billion debt deal is always a daunting prospect, but when a country’s entire economic survival plan depends on it, the exercise can be hair-raising, as the seven lead-managers of Argentina’s voluntary debt exchange discovered in June.

If the bankers needed any more motivation to make every call, to consider every technical twist to make the deal work, they might have considered that the near-term prospects of the business in which they work – emerging-debt capital markets – also depended on the outcome.

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