Sovereign haircuts / SYC

Seychelles

One concluded restructuring, settled in 2010. It cost creditors 56.2% of the present value of their claim, 2 years after the default that began in 2008.

Restructurings

56.2%

Median present-value haircut

56.2%

Worst present-value haircut

0 of 1

Cut face value by zero

$376M

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
2008	2010	2	56.2%	50.0%	$376M	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 1 Seychelles restructuring episode 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. 1 of 1 episode starts after the panel ends. 1 episode has no Waterloo country-code match.

Episode

Selected episode: default 2008, settled 2010, case 269, spell SYC_2008-2010. Window: Jan 1, 2007 to Dec 31, 2011.

The Waterloo panel has no country code match for Seychelles (2008-2010), so this episode cannot be plotted from that dataset. The absence is coverage, not a zero price.

Seychelles 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
SYC_2008-2010	2008	2010	3	1

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 1 restructuring 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
Seychelles	2010-02-01	56.2%	56.9%	50.0%	10.7%	bond exchange	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

$11.0M 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
Domestic (fiscal) arrears	$11.0M

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

Restructurings with Chinese creditors

6 restructurings with Chinese creditors are recorded here. No haircut is attached to any of them, so they cannot be placed on the scale above; the file records only whether face value or the interest rate was cut.

Year	Type	Creditor	Terms
2000	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	First rescheduling of the 1997 China Ex-Im Bank RMB 50 mn Government Concessional Loan for the East Coast Housing Project with original loan terms as follows: 4% interest rate, 8-year maturity, and 3-year grace period. In 2000, China Ex-Im Bank granted a 3-year maturity and a 3-year grace period extension.
2001	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	Second rescheduling of the 1997 China Ex-Im Bank RMB 50 mn Government Concessional Loan for the East Coast Housing Project with original loan terms as follows: 4% interest rate, 8-year maturity, and 3-year grace period. In 2001, China Ex-Im Bank granted an interest rate reduction of 200 bps.
2003	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	Third rescheduling of the 1997 China Ex-Im Bank RMB 50 mn Government Concessional Loan for the East Coast Housing Project with original loan terms as follows: 4% interest rate, 8-year maturity, and 3-year grace period. In 2003, China Ex-Im Bank granted an additional 3-year maturity and 2-year grace period extension.
2004	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	China Ex-Im Bank reschedules the 1998 87.98 mn RMB Government Concessional Loan for the Les Mamelles Housing Project with the following original terms: 4% interest rate, 8-year maturity, and a 4-year grace period. In 2004, China Ex-Im Bank granted a 8-year maturity extension, a 1-year grace period extension and an interest reduction of 200 bps.
2006	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	Fourth rescheduling of the 1997 China Ex-Im Bank RMB 50 mn Government Concessional Loan for the East Coast Housing Project with original loan terms as follows: 4% interest rate, 8-year maturity, and 3-year grace period. In 2006, China Ex-Im Bank granted an additional 2-year grace period extension.
2011	Debt rescheduling only	China Ex-Im Bank	Final rescheduling between China Ex-Im Bank and the Seychelles that covered three different loans: 1) The 1997 Government Concessional Loan that had been restructured in 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2006 2) The 1998 Government Concessional Loan that had been restructured in 2004 3) The 2005 Government Concessional Loan for 8 mn RMB with original terms as follows: 2% interest rate, 10-year maturity, and 4-year grace period The 2011 restructuring increased maturities by roughly 15 years and grace periods by roughtly 10 years. See Garnder et al. (2020) for a hair-cut estimate.

Source: Horn, Reinhart & Trebesch, China's overseas lending and debt restructurings Methodology

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