Odd Lots - Here's What Could Happen to Venezuela's Messy $170 Billion of Debt

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

There are a bunch of questions right now about the future of Venezuela, and one of the big ones is what's going to happen to its circa $170 billion pile of debt. Some investors have been snapping up d...efaulted Venezuelan bonds, betting that a future restructuring could hand them a hefty payout. Others argue that the Venezuelan people shouldn't be saddled with debt issued by an authoritarian regime. In this episode, we speak with the legendary lawyer Lee Buchheit. Lee has worked on more than two dozen sovereign debt restructurings over the course of a 40-year career, including those of Iraq and Greece. He explains how a Venezuelan debt workout might unfold and the unique challenges that arise when trying to restructure the obligations of a sovereign nation. Read more:Santander, BBVA and Deutsche Lead $3 Billion Repo for ArgentinaDonation From Century-Old Fund Cuts UK Debt by £607 Million Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Starting point is 00:00:51 I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, Venezuela. Venezuela Week. So we've done the oil market. Yeah. We got to do the debt market. We got to do the debt market.
Starting point is 00:01:00 I don't know anything about this stuff. Well, okay. One of the reasons that I really like covering the debt market bonds is because I think we're used to thinking of bonds as contracts. Yeah. But I always like to think of them more as stories. Yeah, yeah. So they're full of all these narratives and embedded values and history.
Starting point is 00:01:22 And there's actually a great quote from Margaret Atwood. She wrote this whole book called Payback on Debt. And she describes it as a story or a memory of who owes what and why. Yeah. And of course, if you're talking about a story or a narrative, those can change over time, right? Absolutely. I mean, so one thing I know is that just since Saturday morning in the early trading, I think the existing defaulted Venezuelan debt that's out there, I think it's rallied. I think it's gone out. Oh, yeah. But I don't understand, like, you know, you're trying to get the economy going again. You're going to make everybody pay for this money that was borrowed by someone who the international community regards to be legitimate as a dictator. If anything, shouldn't the creditors that facilitated his ongoing rise, shouldn't they have to pay? Not only should they not get paid. back, shouldn't they pay the people of Venezuela extra for having subsidized someone that is widely
Starting point is 00:02:16 regarded to be a criminal? We're calling this guy a narco-terrorist, and yet, so it's like, shouldn't we punish the people who lent to him? Maybe you should be on the restructuring team, Joe. No, but it's true. So this is the debate. So you're right. Bonds have rallied. So there's Venezuelan sovereign debt. There's also debt issued by Peda Vesa. And those have gone from like five cents on the dollar a few years ago to more than the same. 30 cents. So people are already making money. And the bet here is that there is going to be some sort of restructuring and they're going to get more money. And of course, the creditors, the investors always want more. Of course. Meanwhile, there's a strong argument that the Venezuelan
Starting point is 00:02:56 people should have their debt load alleviated in some way. Yeah, I'm in favor of a negative recovery. Okay. All right. Well, we really do have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. someone we've had on the show before, but it's been a while. We're going to be speaking with Lee Bukhite. He is a retired lawyer now. He's had a 40-year legal career, worked on more than two dozen sovereign debt restructurings, including Greece and Iraq. And that's going to be relevant to this conversation. So really, the perfect guest. Lee, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Tracy, and Joe. Good to be back. Maybe just to begin. Can you sort of set out the scene of the creditors and the debt that Venezuela actually owes.
Starting point is 00:03:46 Who owns those bonds and how much debt are we talking about? In total, probably now the Venezuelan debt is someplace between 150 and 170 billion. Not all of that is bonds, and that's one of the issues that we should discuss. The bonds that we're talking about are principally Republic of Venezuela and pedivasa bonds, roughly split 50-50. They were issued during the Chavez and early Maduro periods. They went into default, all of them, in the fall of 2017. You remember Mr. Trump in his first term imposed sanctions on Venezuela. in August of 2017, the response was to have the bonds go into default, and they have remained in default since then.
Starting point is 00:04:45 One of the difficulties that Venezuela will face in restructuring its what I call legacy debt stock is that there are all kinds of other liabilities that are not in the form of bonds. So there are unpaid trade creditors. There are holders of arbitration awards, chunky arbitration awards. There are people with blocked deposits in Venezuela. And so the restructuring when and if it comes will not be the simple homogenous kind of restructuring that we're used to where there are bonds or in the old days bank loans. this is going to be a much more diverse creditor group. Is there a formal hierarchy that exists either in written law or in norms that sort of
Starting point is 00:05:42 establish who comes first when we have these multitude of instruments, or is it the type of things where the conditions of each country depending on what they are, et cetera, and maybe the conventions, not necessarily written down the same way in formal law will help sort of determine that waterfall, I suppose. Nothing in law, but in convention, debts extended by the multilateral institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, that sort of thing, are treated as preferred creditors.
Starting point is 00:06:17 So they will not be restructured in a formal sense. Once you come down from that level, Then you have government debts. So, you know, debts extended by France, Germany, the United States, typically for export, encouragement, and then commercial debts. And that can be bonds, bank loans, and these various other sorts of things. They all rank equally. Okay. Now, the government creditors would like you to believe that they have some kind of intermediate
Starting point is 00:06:55 seniority, but in fact, they don't. So Joe touched on this in his emotional intro. I wasn't expecting to get so excited, but it's like, we're calling this guy a narco terrorist and they have to pay back his debts. There's an inconsistency there, sure. Lee, what about the old odious debt argument, this idea that if debt is issued by, I guess, an odious regime or an illegitimate regime of some sort, then maybe you don't have to pay it back at all? Yeah, this is a very sensitive area, Tracy. International law is very strict in saying that
Starting point is 00:07:34 governments succeed to inherit the obligations of their predecessors, and no matter how different in political philosophy, one administration may be from another. So the Bolsheviks take over from the czar in 1917, international law says the Bolsheviks have been. got to honor the debt. Napoleon Bonaparte honored the debts of the bourbon monarchs that he followed. The exception, there are very limited exceptions to that. One of them that was first talked about in the early part of the 20th century was odious debts in its original formulation that meant a debt incurred by a dictatorial regime where the proceeds were not. used for the benefit of the citizenry of the debtor country and where the creditor knew
Starting point is 00:08:34 or should have known that the dictator was going to steal the money. So it was a pretty narrow category. It was resurrected in 2003 in the context of Saddam's Iraq. And there was a push there by among others, many in the George W. Bush administration who wished to have Saddam's debts disavowed on the basis that they were odious. My view at the time was that that was ill-advised, that the doctrine of odious debt is sufficiently gauzy, that it is not something that the international community could have endorsed, because once you start down that road, there are a lot of sketchy characters out there whose debt you might want to disavow. So my view at that time was that Iraq would be able to achieve very significant debt relief
Starting point is 00:09:41 without unfurling the banner of odious debt. Can you explain a little bit more what you see as the negative consequences of this notion of, odious debt because I think a lot of people are just maybe their heartstrings. They're like, yes, we should start using this principle. Saddam bad. The lender is to him probably had a reason to think he was a bad guy. What do you see as the cost of introducing this concept into sort of sovereign debt law or norms? Yeah, Joe, I entirely understand the emotional argument. It strikes most people as reprehensible that you could have a dictatorial, kleptomaniacal regime that signs a contract on behalf of the Republic of Rorotania.
Starting point is 00:10:31 And when that son of the bachelor exits the stage, the poor people of Rorotania have got to repay that debt. That's the emotional argument. The other side of it is what constitutes an odious debt? you can have an odious regime that borrows money to build a children's cancer hospital. On the other hand, you can have a democratically elected regime that borrows money to finance a terrorist organization. What happened in the Iraq situation was the Bush team really would have defined it as any debt. incurred by an odious regime. Okay, even if you take that, tell me what is an odious regime? Is it one that
Starting point is 00:11:30 makes war on its neighbors? Yes, probably. Is it one that is insufficiently attuned to environmental factors? Is it one that misprizes women? Tell me what's odious. And I'm Once you start down that road, pretty hard to find a regime that would, to everyone's satisfaction, be regarded as virtuous. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend.
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Starting point is 00:13:43 An alleged narco-terrorist. Yeah, okay. Well, Saddam Hussein was never a narco-terrorist, was he? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't remember. I was only like 11.
Starting point is 00:13:55 Narco-terrorism is probably one of the few sins that Saddam did not commit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A point in his favor. Talk about the parallels here. Can we look at the Iraq sovereign debt restructuring, which I think ended up being something like 10 cents on the dollar for creditors. Is that the guiding light here? Would you expect Venezuela
Starting point is 00:14:16 to follow a similar path? No, no. Iraq was unusual for this reason. You remember that George W. Bush, George II, put together a coalition of 40-some countries. Saddam was ousted after a full invasion of the country. So the country was run by the coalition, Provisional Authority, largely led by the United States, but the Brits were there and there were some others. They really did run the country, not in the way Donald Trump says he runs Venezuela. At that point, the Coalition Provisional Authority really did run it. The Bush team really wanted that experiment to succeed. They wanted a stable, democratic Iraq.
Starting point is 00:15:09 right in the middle of the Middle East. Someone that would support Israel when that became necessary, they wanted a bulwark against Iran. And they really wanted it to succeed. And their perception at the time, this is now 2003-4, was that this miasmic cloud of debt that Saddam had accumulated, and ceased paying, by the way, in 1990 when the Security Council put sanctions on them, that debt stock would effectively keep anyone from investing in Iraq, lending it money, and so forth. So it was viewed by the Bush people as a major obstacle to the economic recovery of Iraq. And so they issued the mandate, deal with that debt stock. in the most expeditious way possible. And as far as they were more of Joe's view that they didn't like
Starting point is 00:16:18 Saddam Hussein and they didn't like anyone who lent money to Saddam Hussein. So they had little sympathy for the creditors. The United States had a very limited exposure. So this was a relatively harmless position for the U.S. government to take. But their initial proposal was to go and say the debt is odious, let's write off 100% of it. And we went to the Paris Club, the group that negotiates governmental, intergovernmental debt. I think with a proposal to write off 95% of it, in the end, 80% of it was written off. And that was absolutely extraordinary for a middle-income country that sits on the fourth largest oil reserves in the world. But that was the mindset of the Bush people.
Starting point is 00:17:15 I don't see Donald Trump having any particular solicitude for the citizens of Venezuela. Its solicitude seems to be for the oil companies and perhaps for the U.S. government itself. That's interesting. I mean, who are we, I supposed, to speculate into Donald Trump's mind? Because on the other hand, you know, it's like oil is at $57 a barrel. Do the oil companies want to spend tens of billions of dollars rebuilding this? Do they want even cheaper oil right now, which would presumably happen if the taps turn on in Venezuela unclear? Setting all that aside and maybe we'll get a little bit more to Donald Trump mind reading in a moment.
Starting point is 00:17:55 What do we know about the holders of Venezuelan debt or Pira Vesa dead? Are we able to tell what type of institutions or entities are currently holding? Joe, there's a function on the terminal called HDS, which stands for holdings, and you can look it up. Okay. Well. But I'll leave it to leave. Yeah. Leave her to the terminal.
Starting point is 00:18:15 No, no. It's mostly traded into the hands of hedge funds. Okay. In January of 2019, Mr. Bush, in his first term, imposed a restriction that prevented U.S. residents from buying Venezuelan debt or even selling it to them. themselves, they could sell it overseas. And so some of it was sold off. But as Tracy said in her introductory remarks, in those days, this debt was trading seven, eight, nine cents on the dollar. But as with most sovereign debt restructurings, when the debt is in the form of bonds, freely tradable bonds, you don't actually know who owns it until such time as you make an offer to
Starting point is 00:19:04 restructuring. Just real quickly as a follow-up, does it matter? Okay, maybe people don't have a lot of sympathy for hedge funds that are picking up distressed debt at two cents or five cents on the dollar. Or maybe people feel differently about some entity that, I don't know, is just conservatively managing sovereign debt for widows and orphans, so to speak. But from the perspective of international law or New York law or sovereign debt restructuring law, does the composition of the creditor group bear into this at all? No. The claim is the claim. Okay. Where it is relevant, Joe, is in the negotiation of the debt. If I sit across from someone who paid 10 cents for their claim and I offer them 20 cents, I'm a hero. But if I sit across from up in the old days
Starting point is 00:19:58 a banker who lent a hundred cents and I offer him 20 cents, I'm a little sense. I offer him 20 cents. I'm a hero. I'm a hero. But if I sit across from up in the old days a banker, I'm a heel. And so it plays into the negotiation in that sense. Would you expect the U.S. Treasury to be heavily involved in these negotiations, just in terms of the actual process, the legal process? Not nearly as much as George Bush's treasury was back in 2004 and five. The U.S. Treasury has always had an interest since 1982 when Mexico began. Dan, the modern era of sovereign debt workouts, U.S. Treasury has always had an interest in seeing these problems dealt with in a consensual negotiated way. So I would expect if and when the time
Starting point is 00:20:50 comes, they would encourage both the Venezuelan administration and the holders of Venezuela's debts to negotiate them in a consensual way. Well, actually, let me back up. I mean, we're talking about these negotiations and the market is clearly reflecting some expectations of a change. But does the arrest, the rendition of Maduro make that inevitable? Does this have to happen? Or is it possible that, again, because his vice president is currently- It's the same regime. It's the same regime, which seems to be Trump seems to be okay with because for whatever reason, we can only say. speculate what kind of conversations they've had in the background and so forth. But is there an inevitability to these negotiations? Is there a formal starting gun? Is there a reason that they ever have to happen? Or could Venezuela just stay on default and sort of model through without any resolution to the debt question? I don't think they can stay in default indefinitely, but there is no
Starting point is 00:21:55 starting gun. As a matter of fact, what has prevented a restructuring of Venezuela's debt since 2017 has been the sanctions imposed by the U.S. government. Oh, yeah, this is funny. So you can't even sit down and begin to talk about a restructuring because you'd be in violation of sanctions. Yeah. And so those sanctions would have to be relaxed. And that decision ultimately sits with Mr. Trump. And he may or may not decide that the removal of Maduro is a sufficient basis on which to begin relaxing sanctions, but I don't think so. On the current path, he will want to see a complacent regime in Caracas.
Starting point is 00:22:45 He has said as much. The president of Venezuela has got to be someone who follows the orders of Donald John Trump. And he said that. If they are sufficiently complacent, then perhaps he will begin relaxing sanctions. perhaps allowing a debris structuring to go forward. What has changed and what will be different this time is if you listen to the president's speech last weekend, he didn't talk about democracy. He made a passing reference to wanting to see Venezuela made great again.
Starting point is 00:23:29 But his principal focus was on the oil companies. He wants them pumping oil, and to that end, in effect, said, we will make sure that your claims for expropriation, which occurred in the Chavez era, are getting paid. And if he is true to what he said back when George Bush was in Iraq, Donald Trump criticized Bush for not having taken Iraqi oil to pay for the costs of the investment. invasion. And so I expect he will say this time that Uncle Sam is entitled to be recompensed for the cost of keeping that naval armada in the Caribbean. So in a restructuring, the waterfall, which is normally a squabble between the citizens of the country and the creditors of the
Starting point is 00:24:29 country. In this case, there may be people at the top, and maybe U.S. government is at the very top, and oil companies come next and then the squabble between citizens and predators. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report. report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data
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Starting point is 00:25:59 One thing I've learned in my life and job is that lawyers are nothing, if not creative. So I'm wondering, is there some sort of creative solution that could at least help, perhaps, on the margin, the Venezuelan debt load while, I guess, preserving the goodwill, so to speak, of investors. So I'm thinking, you know, maybe they get an extension instead of a haircut or maybe you have something like the Mexico situation where you have new loans, but those fall under different treatment to the older debt, something like that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:37 Look, a couple of things. First, the oil infrastructure in this country has been. badly degraded. It's going to take two to five years, I think, of significant investment to bring that infrastructure up to the point where Venezuela is pumping what it was pumping, say, back in 2016, maybe three million barrels a day. So this is not going to happen overnight that there's a huge influx of revenues. The second point, If Mr. Trump is true to his word, first dibs on those revenues will go to the oil companies who are making these investments. Third, some money is going to have to be used to have a discernible improvement in the lives of Venezuelan citizens.
Starting point is 00:27:35 Otherwise, the regime that's in power will be very fragile. So you're talking about years in which most of this money is going to have to go places other than into the pockets of legacy bondholders. What I would expect, therefore, is that the bondholders will ask for what is generically called a value recovery instrument. This is a country that derives 95% of its foreign currency earnings from the sale of a commodity oil. So the logical thing would be for the bondholders to say, give us an instrument that is a play on the oil market. That was done, by the way. In the early 90s, during the so-called Brady initiative, you had oil exporters, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, and they sweetened their Brady restructurings by giving oil warrants that would pay off
Starting point is 00:28:47 if oil exceeded a certain strike price in the future. Mexico's issued in 1990 had the strike price set at the enormous level of $14 a barrel. But I would expect that that will be the fudge factor in a Venezuelan restructuring. You're right that most payments will have to be deferred for quite a long time, but an oil instrument is likely to be part of the mix. When we're talking about international law with respect to sovereign debt, what law are we actually talk about? Because I know often they talk about New York law where a lot of bonds actually get issued or they go through the banks there, whatever. So when you talk about, okay, international law says this, that, or whatever about what corpus of law are we actually talking about here
Starting point is 00:29:40 and what law is relevant to the Venezuelan debt? Yeah. The debt instruments themselves will be issued under the law of a municipal jurisdiction. 95% of sovereign emerging market, sovereign debt is issued under the law of either New York or England. Okay. In Venezuela's case, it's all New York law. Okay.
Starting point is 00:30:05 When I say international law, that's not the law applicable to the contract. That's really the law applicable to the governments that form part of the international system. So it will be New York law in the case of Venezuela. But just on this note, I know there's been chatter for a long time now about creating some sort of common framework when it comes to sovereign debt restructurings. Is that at all realistic at this point in time, or is it still sort of pie in the sky thinking? That idea was first broached back at the time of the Argentine default in December of 2001. And it was actually promoted by the IMF. They called it the sovereign debt restructuring mechanism.
Starting point is 00:30:57 They reasoned as follows in corporate debt work. under bankruptcy, municipal bankruptcy laws, if a supermajority of the creditors agree to restructuring, their decision binds any dissenting minority. Sovereigns are not subject to a bankruptcy law, and so sovereign debt workouts have been characterized by holdout creditors, that is, creditors that do not join a voluntary debt restructuring, and seek to pursue their legal remedies. Argentina knows all about this. Yes, they do.
Starting point is 00:31:39 So the IMF reasoned, well, what we need is a Chapter 11 for sovereigns. That idea died a political death because the Americans did not support it. But it continues to have some vitality. and bills have been introduced over the last few years into the New York legislature, one of them suggesting that perhaps New York, whose law governs many of these dead instruments should itself put in place a kind of Chapter 11 process. It hasn't gotten much traction. I don't think that will.
Starting point is 00:32:24 Why not? Ah, for a bunch of reasons, there are aspects of sovereign debt workouts that differ materially from corporate debt workouts. Among other things, the court does not control the foreign sovereign. Can not create foreign sovereign. We're going to liquidate you. We're going to take the keys to, well, I mean, keys to Venezuela, kind of doing it. Exactly. They can't say we're going to replace. the management. Sovereigns are sovereign. And that has always been the principal feature of sovereign debt workouts is that you're dealing with debtors who are not subject to any institutionalized bankruptcy regime. Therefore, we've had to rely on consensual workouts. But I'm not going to put too fine a point on the word consensual, sometimes there's been encouragement.
Starting point is 00:33:29 All right, Lee, we're going to have to leave it there, but it's been so good to catch up with you, really the perfect guest for this particular topic. So thank you so much. Okay, guys. Thank you. Thanks, Lee. That was fantastic. So good.
Starting point is 00:33:42 Thank you, Lee. Bye, bye. Joe, I really enjoyed that conversation. Lee has an incredible talent for explaining things in very, very clear language. But, you know, the thing that stuck out to me is, I guess the contrast between sovereign versus corporate debt. Yeah. You know, he talked about it at the end, this idea that you can't really have a sort of standardized bankruptcy process for a sovereign as you do with a corporate because sovereigns are sovereign. You can't have like a new equity.
Starting point is 00:34:23 It's like, oh, and now the country goes to the equity holders, right? Because that's what happens in a company, right? So it's like, oh, all that, you know what? Oh, the debtor's got a haircut and there's a new, they become equity holders. Yeah. The debtors become, what would that even mean in the sovereign concept for the debtors to become equity holders? Except to some extent, to his point, which I thought was interesting, it was like, okay, you could have an oil linked instrument. But not every country that gets in trouble is going to have like a very easily saleable commodities such as oil. Yeah. And also just I talked about this in the intro, but the idea of debt is a human construct. Yeah. Like, it doesn't actually exist except in our minds. And on the pages of the terminal. And on the pages of the terminal, of course.
Starting point is 00:35:09 So it can change over time. And there are all these values embedded in it. And one man's legitimate regime is another man's or another investor's dictatorship. And it seems very hard to litigate that in a public court. Totally. How you define odious? How do you define an odious regime? How do you define what are appropriate proceeds and inappropriate proceeds clearly, extremely, extremely
Starting point is 00:35:33 difficult. And of course, sure, maybe the U.S. government right now will say Maduro, narco terrorists, et cetera. But that is just the perspective of the Department of Justice, which has filed charges against Maduro, whether that's some objective reality difficult. By the way, I love that episode. I would have rather not asked any questions and just listen to Lee Talk. He has the perfect radio voice. We're going to get him to narrate something, I think. Now that he's retired, he has some time. He can narrate our next long form episode. Yeah, maybe we should do like a three-part series on sovereign debt, but just be narrated by the book.
Starting point is 00:36:13 Just happily tell stories about, you know, being across the table from various creditors. I love that. Representing various failed governments or post-failed governments or unsavory care. Yes, that sounds great. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.
Starting point is 00:36:30 I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armid, Dashel Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots, with the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord. G.G. slash Oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you want us to have Lee come back and talk for three hours by himself, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free.
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