Sovereign haircuts / GUY

Guyana

2 concluded restructurings, between 1992 and 1999. The earliest default they settle began in 1982. The worst cost creditors 91.0% of the present value of their claim, in 1999. The longest gap between a default and its settlement was 10 years.

Restructurings

90.1%

Median present-value haircut

91.0%

Worst present-value haircut

0 of 2

Cut face value by zero

$238M

Debt treated (2020 $)

Every restructuring

Two measures of the same deals, never combined. The present-value haircut discounts what creditors got against what they were owed; the face-value reduction counts only principal written off.

Present-value haircutFace-value reduction

Default	Settled	Years to settle	Present-value haircut	Face-value reduction	Debt treated (2020 $)	Source
1982	1992	10	89.2%	89.2%	$156M	Cruces and Trebesch (2013)
1993	1999	6	91.0%	91.0%	$83M	Cruces and Trebesch (2013)

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Debt treated is the amount restructured, deflated to constant 2020 US dollars in the source file. A negative haircut means the new instruments were worth more than the old claim. Methodology

Bond prices

0 of 2 Guyana restructuring episodes have Waterloo prices during the restructuring interval

The haircut file dates episodes by year. Waterloo matches them by country code and plots a padded window from one year before default through one year after settlement.

The public Waterloo bond panel in this repo runs from Jan 1, 1822 to Dec 1, 1980. This selector uses price only, never pbid or pask, and shows one line per bond from one year before default to one year after settlement. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD”; it does not document normalization to face value. Across all 329 haircut episodes, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after Dec 1, 1980. Those two counts overlap. 2 of 2 episodes start after the panel ends. 2 episodes have no Waterloo country-code match.

Episode

Selected episode: default 1993, settled 1999, case 158, spell GUY_1982-1999. Window: Jan 1, 1992 to Dec 31, 2000.

The Waterloo panel has no country code match for Guyana (1993-1999), so this episode cannot be plotted from that dataset. The absence is coverage, not a zero price.

Guyana has restructuring episodes on this page, but none has a covered Waterloo price observation inside its restructuring interval in the public parquet bundled with this repo.

Each option includes its case id and default-spell id. The chart includes every priced bond for that country in the window, so it does not identify bonds belonging to the selected restructuring. The one-year padding is a display window, one year either side; an editorial choice rather than a source-defined threshold. It uses waterloo_bonds.price only; pbid and pask are not averaged into it. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD” and does not document face-value normalization. GBP and USD observations use separate labelled panels and y-axes. Of the 329 episodes in the haircut file, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after 1980-12-01; these counts overlap. Later episodes show an absence message rather than an implied zero.

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo (bond-price panel) | Harvard Dataverse, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo Methodology

Default spells

Spell	From	To	Years	Restructurings
GUY_1982-1999	1982	1999	18	2

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Duration counts both endpoints. The spells table also carries a cumulative-haircut column; it is not published here because it does not reconcile with the per-episode haircuts, see the methodology. Methodology

The Cruces-Trebesch record: a third measure and the discount rate

The Cruces-Trebesch file carries 2 restructurings here, and adds the market haircut (the new instruments against the face value of the old claim, undiscounted) and the exit yield used to do the discounting. The deal label is the file’s own and is finer than the country: it names the instrument class the deal covered. The two files were assembled separately, so a deal here need not line up one-to-one with a row above.

Deal	Date	Present value	Market	Face value	Exit yield	Structure	Data quality
Guyana	1992-11-01	89.2%	89.2%	89.2%	none (buy back)	buyback	3 / 5
Guyana	1999-12-01	91.0%	91.0%	91.0%	none (buy back)	buyback	3 / 5

Source: Cruces & Trebesch, haircut dataset (2014 update) Data quality is the file's own 1-to-5 index of how well the deal terms are documented. Methodology

Debt still in default

$75.0M across 1 creditor class in 2024. A haircut can only be measured once a restructuring concludes, so any of this that is still being negotiated is by construction absent from the tables above.

Creditor class	In default, 2024
Other official creditors	$75.0M

Source: Bank of Canada-Bank of England Sovereign Default Database (CRAG) Bank of Canada terms (attribution). Includes domestic arrears, so it is not comparable with the debt-treated column above. Methodology

Methodology, the measures, and what this data cannot tell you