The role of the IMF in debt restructurings: lending into arrears, moral hazard and sustainability concerns

Abstract

In recent years the IMF has made efforts to build an improved “crisis prevention and resolution framework” that minimizes the size and frequency of bailouts, largely out of a concern with the possible moral hazard consequences of its interventions. This framework, however, which includes an emphasis on greater private sector involvement, the encouragement of the use of collective action clauses and a more effective enforcement of access limits to IMF lending has not generated an observable change in practice. The institution may be trying to achieve an almost impossible objective: imposing more stringent criteria to constrain its intervention capacity without recognizing that such an approach is ultimately inconsistent with the IMF’s intrinsically political nature. This is clearly evidenced in the cases of countries that have to restructure their debts. The failure of the SDRM project reflected, among other factors, the prevailing view in the United States administration that market forces should be relied on to find an “solution” in these situations almost on their own. But this has in practice meant that the IMF relinquishes its potential contribution to improving the result of sovereign debt restructurings. In fact, the IMF has frequently exerted pressure on the debtor and its views have often been biased in favour of the creditors’ interests. In particular, its lending into arrears policy (LIA) has been used as a means to induce debtor governments to “accommodate” to these interests. But by providing financing to the debtor through its LIA policy the Fund could potentially play a positive role in reducing the gap between the creditors’ “reservation price” and the country’s repayment capacity while, at the same time, making sure that the debt burden becomes sustainable. In this way, both debtor countries and its creditors would be better off. However, the Fund should not support “market-friendly” sovereign debt restructurings that are incompatible with sustainable debt paths and may represent a greater risk for its resources than more “coercive” alternatives. Indeed, the paradox is that “investor friendly” debt restructurings represent quite the opposite of a market outcome: they require active and often massive IMF interventions and the level of the resulting haircut is sub-optimally low.

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