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conversations.value: a description for a book titled Too Little, Too Late about Science, Indiana, African-American with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary. Start with the sentence 'the author is a novelist, poet, and screenwriter whose writing has left an impact on everyone who has come across it'.
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conversations.value: the author is a novelist, poet, and screenwriter whose writing has left an impact on everyone who has come across it. Her distinct style separates her from most as she addresses controversial issues and relates them to the African-American community. With familiar characters and drama packed storylines, her down-to-earth approach has proved to be reader-friendly and well received. She first obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology/Athletic Training from Indiana University. After revisiting an old screenplay that she wrote in the ninth grade, she decided to fully embrace her passion for writing and turned Too Little, Too Late into a novel. Not abandoning the movie idea, she attended Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida to learn the ins and outs of the film industry so that she can one day make her vision come to life. She earned an Associate of Science degree in Film and Video Production. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Portia divides her time between Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and Stone Mountain, Georgia. She is currently working on her second novel.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book. End with the sentence ' Judicial rulings inadvertently demonstrated the perils of incomplete restructuring that had preoccupied theoretical literature in the 1990s (Eichengreen and Portes, 1995; Brooks, Guzman, Lombardi and Stiglitz, 2015).'.
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conversations.value: Too Little, Too Late
  On August 29, 2014, the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) published new recommended terms for sovereign bond contracts governed by English law (ICMA, 2014b). The change would allow a supermajority of creditors to approve a debtor's restructuring proposal in one vote across multiple bond series. The vote could bind all bondholders, even if one series voted unanimously against restructuring, so long as enough holders in the other series voted for it. This apparently technical change, awkwardly named "single-limb aggregated collective action clauses" promised to eliminate free-riding holdouts for the first time in the history of sovereign bond restructuring. A single vote across different bond issues could also open up new possibilities for abuse.
  The markets might have rebelled. Instead, they yawned. On October 7, barely a month after ICMA launched its new collective action clauses (CACs), Kazakhstan became the first to use them in an English-law bond. The issue, Kazakhstan's first in fourteen years, was oversubscribed by a factor of four.1 Vietnam adapted the mechanism in an unregistered $1 billion New York–law bond within a month with no apparent push-back from investors, despite being well below investment grade (at BB−). In November, investment-grade Mexico inserted a streamlined version of single-limb aggregation in its multi-billion-dollar New York–law bond program. Mexico's size and prominence among emerging-market issuers ensured that its choice of contract terms would be closely watched in the market. During a conference call hosted by Mexico's investment bankers to introduce the new CACs, not one investor objected or asked a question (JPMorgan, 2014). The November issue set the record for the lowest yield and lowest coupon of any ten-year U.S.-dollar bond issued by the Mexican government (Diaz de Leon, 2016). Half a dozen other countries adopted single-limb aggregation within months; each launch was equally uneventful. The financial press greeted the news with a smattering of articles and editorials, calm in tone and broadly supportive in substance.
  Mexico launched the first SEC-registered bond with majority-amendment CACs in February 2003, departing from the New York custom of giving each bondholder a veto over contract amendments. By all accounts, it did so primarily to recapture its own debt narrative and block SDRM; fighting holdouts was a secondary objective at best (Gelpern and Gulati, 2013). Perhaps as a result, the change looks modest in retrospect: each series of bonds must vote separately, so that any series where objectors held a blocking minority could drop out of the restructuring. Nevertheless, investors on the conference call with Mexico's underwriters were outraged and threatened to boycott the issue.
  It turns out that the amplitude of public debate and market resistance are poor proxies for the magnitude of change. The new generation of aggregated CACs goes some way toward bridging the gap between corporate and sovereign bankruptcy. Once widely adopted, single-limb aggregation would introduce—by contract—a basic bankruptcy concept of voting by class, rather than by instrument, in sovereign bonds governed by foreign law (IMF, 2003b). As a result, single-limb aggregated CACs are likely to have a much bigger impact on sovereign restructurings than the series-by-series CACs introduced in New York in 2003 and long customary in the London market.
  The relatively smooth introduction of potent contract changes in 2014 has many explanations. Substance and process learning are surely a big part of the story. Substance learning came from over a decade of experience with series-by-series CACs, which helped on the margins in several small restructurings but were hardly revolutionary (Das, Papaioannou, and Trebesch, 2012; Duggar, 2013). "Two-limb" aggregation clauses with both stock-wide and series-by-series polling had been introduced in Uruguay (in 2003), Argentina (in 2005), and most importantly, across euro-area sovereign bonds (in 2013)—although they had not been used in a restructuring (Gelpern and Gulati, 2013). CACs had become mainstream: constructive and inoffensive. On the other hand, the Greek debt restructuring in 2012 and never-ending litigation stemming from Argentina's 2001 default revealed vulnerabilities in series-by-series CACs. In Greece, blocking positions led more than half of all foreign-law bonds to drop out of the restructuring, even though most Greek foreign-law bonds had CACs. These bonds continue to be paid in full (Zettelmeyer, Trebesch, and Gulati, 2013). In the case of Argentina, rulings by U.S. federal courts in favor of holdouts beginning in 2011 effectively blocked payments on restructured bonds unless the government paid the holdout plaintiffs in full, potentially upsetting the delicate balance between risk and reward that drove investor participation in earlier restructurings. As we write, neither the holdouts nor the restructured bondholders in Argentina are getting paid. Judicial rulings inadvertently demonstrated the perils of incomplete restructuring that had preoccupied theoretical literature in the 1990s (Eichengreen and Portes, 1995; Brooks, Guzman, Lombardi and Stiglitz, 2015).
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conversations.value: three more paragraphs
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conversations.value: It is sometimes asserted that committees increase the expense of a restructuring deal. Most usually, committees engage expert advisers, financial and legal, to aid them in their work. These advisers come with a cost, and the issuer is asked to bear that cost. Of course, it is difficult to argue with the idea that there is an expense entailed in dealing with a committee. But issuers readily accept this cost in the end, at least when the advisers' work helps lead to a deal that is widely supported by the creditor community, enabling the issuer to achieve its larger goals. The added expense always pales in comparison to the benefit of a successful deal, especially one that follows the best practices of creditor engagement the IMF, the World Bank, and INSOL International generally advocate. At the same time, it is important that committees' expenses be carefully controlled. In addition to a possible expense-management function of an overarching body that might play a useful role on this subject, committees themselves are powerful regulators of the expense of the restructuring exercise. Committees know that all stakeholders ultimately bear the cost of any expense, even if the issuer pays. Practical experience shows that committees limit their advisers' roles to their pure areas of expertise, and committees are increasingly in the habit of requiring budgets and cost efficiency of their advisers.
  Some are of the opinion that a creditor committee may overly strengthen the position of a sovereign's creditors, weakening an issuer's ability to achieve needed creditor concessions. One could surely posit scenarios in which a committee might enhance already existing power of a sovereign's creditors in ways that could potentially be dangerous. For example, any group of creditors that alone has the power to materially affect new lending to a sovereign might be overly empowered by a committee, which could institutionalize such power. In the era before Brady bonds, for example, when private sector lending to sovereigns was driven by globally powerful banks, we could imagine a sovereign becoming concerned. On the other hand, in today's world of sovereign bond issuances, widely disbursed bond holdings, and few, if any, incentives or mechanics for investors to cooperate to "blacklist" any country, we contend any parallel fears are overdone. With the exception of Argentina, to whom most investors are agreed further sovereign lending is unwise (in no small part due to Argentina's very decision to advance its proposed restructuring while declining to engage any creditor committees), investment views about any given country can vary quite widely among investors in both primary and secondary markets. Investors simply lack the concentrated power that global banking syndicates once enjoyed.
  Some have also asked whether it would be possible to standardize and to supervise committee behavior so as to provide comfort to issuers that committees will be predictably constructive. Practical experience indicates that creditors in general are quite effective at regulating their own activities, including tempering hostile actions against a stressed issuer. Committees tend to behave responsibly toward the objective of maximizing value sustainably in light of the known economic dynamics and constraints.
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conversations.value: the last paragraph
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conversations.value: UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), xxi, ; legitimacy of, ; Principles on Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing from, 153–54, , 215–16, , ; Sovereign Debt Workout Mechanism from,