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Steering Greece's Debt Restructuring Through the CDS Quicksand

A central policy concern since the onset of the Greek debt crisis in 2010 has been whether a sovereign debt restructuring by a country in the Eurozone would trigger credit default swaps (CDS). For the first time since AIG threatened to default on its CDS in 2008, the Greek debt crisis returned CDS to the global spotlight. While there is universal agreement that a hard sovereign default would trigger a non-payment credit event under CDS, there is considerable uncertainty about whether formally voluntary restructuring scenarios would trigger a credit restructuring event. This article assesses how likely several restructuring scenarios, ranging from the retrofitting of CACs onto existing debt instruments over the use of CACs to the use of exit consent are to trigger CDS. The paper is structured into five parts. Part I describes credit defaults swaps and their effect on restructurings. Part II examines sovereign debt restructuring; Part III examines the restructuring credit event in CDS. Finally, Part IV examines six restructuring scenarios for how likely they are to trigger a restructuring credit event.