Political risks have always been present in emerging debt markets and we’ve long taken them into consideration within our overall country risk process.

In recent years we have witnessed a surge in sovereign bond defaults in emerging markets.

In August 2020, as the global pandemic was straining emerging countries’ ability to make debt payments, we published a white paper – “Sovereign Contingent Bonds: How Emerging Countries Might Prepay for Debt Relief” – introducing the concept of “sovereign coco bonds,” a way for countries to structure bond agreements to allow for more flexible policy options in the face of a crisis.

Over our decades of involvement in emerging country debt markets, we’ve witnessed many ups and downs.

Emerging countries have been in the midst of a crisis that is not of their own making. A great majority of these countries are navigating the crisis fairly well.

Game theory is a useful framework for modeling aspects of sovereign debt recoveries, given that it models the interactions among debtors and creditors in the lending/borrowing "game." While there is a long-established set of precedents for Paris Club (U.S. & European) and multilateral (IMF, etc) creditors’ actions, we still have little available information about how China will act in debt negotiations.

On January 31, 2019, J.P. Morgan, which manages the EMBI suite of emerging market bond indices, added five new countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)1 to the external debt benchmarks. This addition represents the largest ever one-time adjustment to the index that our foreign currency sovereign debt funds have historically used as a benchmark.

Periodic bouts of volatility are a fact of life for emerging market investors, but for those who can ride out such periods of real or perceived crisis, dollar-denominated EM sovereign debt can offer compelling returns.

"A rising global interest rate environment is once again leading to volatility in the emerging debt markets,” writes GMO’s Carl Ross in a newly-published Emerging Debt Insights piece. As the US 10-year Treasury has risen to the 3% neighborhood, benchmarks of emerging country bonds, both in hard currency and local currency, have fallen.

Countless articles have been written in the past 10 years predicting (or warning) of China’s imminent financial demise, with the number of articles accelerating in recent years amid China’s debt build-up in the post Global Financial Crisis period. Investing on the basis of a “China collapse” view of the world would likely have resulted in more risk-averse portfolios in the emerging debt space and, hence, lower returns in recent years.