The Vultures Victory

How can I stay sober with that vulture's beak inside me?

Americans have seen how financial firms put their own interests ahead of those of the country and the world. The vulture funds have raised greed to a new level.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to these problems. Investors could agree to insert language into bond contracts that leaves no room for vulture funds.

Economists applauded Argentina s attempt to avoid this outcome through a deep restructuring accompanied by the GDP linked bonds.

The fact that the International Monetary Fund, the US Department of Justice, and anti poverty NGOs all joined in opposing the vulture funds is revealing. But so, too, is the court s decision, which evidently assigned little weight to their arguments.

Is that place very far from here?

And you're here alone, blind and singing...

Some might counter that the holdout hedge funds that sued Argentina deserve no sympathy, either. Many are called vulture funds because they bought the debt at a steep discount from the original creditors, hoping to profit subsequently through court decisions.

But this still allowed the vultures to block the process by buying up a third of a particular bond issue. By contrast, purchasing a third of a country s entire debt stock, as required for a blocking position when all bondholders vote together, is an altogether more costly proposition.

This is where I keep away from the leeches and vultures upstairs...

The mocking bird, the jay, the little brown thrush and the sparrow, till the only thing left was the buzzards.

Griesa s ruling threatened to hold the Bank of New York Mellon, the Argentine government s agent, in contempt if it paid other bondholders without also paying the vultures. Effectively barred from servicing its debt on the renegotiated terms, Argentina had little choice but to default again.

Haydée proved quite compatible and able to follow our lead, without imitating our quirks too much.

The vultures showed no scruples in profiting at the expense of Argentine taxpayers. They are now deploying the same strategy against the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world s poorest countries.

This quixotic strategy met with unexpected success when Federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in the holdouts favor. Griesa idiosyncratically reinterpreted the pari passu, or equal treatment, clause in the debt contracts to mean that vulture funds refusing to participate in the earlier debt exchange should receive not 30 but 100 cents on the dollar.

Their litigation strategy took advantage of a standard contractual clause (called pari passu) intended to ensure that all claimants are treated equally. Incredibly, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York decided that this meant that if Argentina paid in full what it owed those who had accepted debt restructuring, it had to pay in full what it owed to the vultures.

But if i say you are, if i stand up for you against that old buzzard and her crew, the world will believe you are.

To make matters worse, when a compromise is reached, the burden falls disproportionately on the debtor, in the form of enforced austerity and structural reforms that make the residual debt even less sustainable. Furthermore, the recent strengthening of creditor rights and the growth of bond financing has made sovereign debt restructuring enormously complex and open to abuse by highly speculative holdout investors, including so called vulture funds.

Such contracts should also include collective action clauses, which make it impossible for vulture funds to hold up debt restructuring. When a sufficient proportion of creditors agree to a restructuring plan (in the case of Argentina, the holders of more than 90 of the country s debt did), the others can be forced to go along.

But a few vulture funds most notoriously the hedge fund Elliott Management, headed by the billionaire Paul E. Singer saw Argentina s travails as an opportunity to make huge profits at the expense of the Argentine people. They bought the old bonds at a fraction of their face value, and then used litigation to try to force Argentina to pay 100 cents on the dollar.

This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty.

And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet these are the different programs the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods.

Human powered airplane Gossamer Condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77, winning the Kremer prize in aviation history, followed by the Albatross. And we began making various odd planes and creatures.

Kicillof has gained international recognition as the public face of Argentina s fight against the so called vulture funds that want to extort full payment on Argentine bonds that they purchased for a few pennies on the dollar. But, before joining President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner s cabinet, Kicillof was known in Argentine intellectual circles as the author of the book Volver a Keynes (Return to Keynes).