La crise éconmique en Argentine (document en anglais)

It's a long story. Simply put, in 2001, at the height of its economic crisis, Argentina was lacking on its debt and stopped all the payments, cutting itself immediately international financial markets. A few years later, the economic situation of the country had improved, and the government tried to return on these: it is not practical to be completely excluded from it. The government thus proposed to his creditors an agreement by which these would affect less than what was initially planned, and indicating that it was take-it-or-leave-it. Many of them accepted the arrangement, thinking it was better to affect the least of the whole. But certain holders of the Argentine debt refused the agreement. The Argentine government thus sent flying to them and decided to pay nothing to them of the whole.

What relationship with the vultures? They are not Condors, in this country, moreover?

Bravo for your zoological knowledge. We call " fund vulture " investment funds the job by which consists in acquiring debts in escheat, which are not any more paid and are not practically worth nothing more, to try then to obtain the complete refund from it. If it works, it is very profitable: we can acquire certain debts in the hundredth of their face value. Obviously, often, it does not work. It is necessary to note that these funds make a useful work: as the vultures that eliminate the corpses of dead animals, these funds allow investors to resell debts. Without these funds, many countries considered as bad payers would never find anybody to lend them no anything.

But these funds vulture stir up controversy. Some for example took advantage of the cancellation of debt of the Third World, the initiative Exulted 2000. They acquired debts of deeply in debt poor countries which were not any more paid, waited the cancellations of debts of the other creditors (governments and international institutions), to demand then the complete payment of the debts of these poor countries where they had acquired for next to nothing.

And Argentina then?

It's been years that this story is lying about trial in trial. The Argentine government was very inflexible, refusing to deal in any way with his last creditors, and preferred to drag them before the courts. This arm-wrestling led for example a fund to make seize by a Ghanaian court a sailboat of the Argentine navy which was on-the-spot. More recently, the Argentine government began payments with the creditors who had accepted the agreement. He passed as it by American financial institutions. The contrary funds lodged a complaint with the courts New Yorker, and required that the money intended to pay the creditors of the agreement is seized to pay them they.

By what right?

Pari Passu.

Eh, what?

It is of the Latin. It is the clause in business law meaning that all the creditors must be handled in the same way. Thus the Argentine government has according to this clause not the right to treat differently the creditors who agreed to agree with her and the others who did not want. The American justice decided that this clause applied, that there was no exception bound to the fact that the debtor is a sovereign state. As a result, the financial institutions which

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