Sovereign haircuts / THA

Thailand

One concluded restructuring, settled in 1947. It cost creditors 12.0% of the present value of their claim, 6 years after the default that began in 1941.

Restructurings

12.0%

Median present-value haircut

12.0%

Worst present-value haircut

1 of 1

Cut face value by zero

$111M

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
1941	1947	6	12.0%	0.0%	$111M	Meyer, Reinhart and Trebesch (2022)

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

1 of 1 Thailand restructuring episode has 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.

Episode

Selected episode: default 1941, settled 1947, case 282, spell THA_1941-1947. Window: Jan 1, 1940 to Dec 31, 1948.

GBP bond prices

Independent GBP y-axis; values are not scaled against another currency.

Bond legend (GBP)

4% Siamese Sterling Loan of 1936, due 1964 (GBP)

4.5% Sterling Bonds of 1907, due 1953 (GBP)

54 monthly observations across 2 bonds. 42 of those observations fall inside the shaded restructuring interval. Earliest point in this window: Sep 1, 1945. Latest: Dec 1, 1948. One line equals one bond; no cross-bond average is computed.

Bond	Currency	ISIN	Obs.	First	Last
4% Siamese Sterling Loan of 1936, due 1964	GBP	not recorded	36	Jan 1, 1946	Dec 1, 1948
4.5% Sterling Bonds of 1907, due 1953	GBP	not recorded	18	Sep 1, 1945	Feb 1, 1947

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
THA_1941-1947	1941	1947	7	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

Debt still in default

The Bank of Canada-Bank of England default database records no debt in default for Thailand in its latest year.

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