A high-risk deadbeat bond

Investors have piled into Argentina's latest dodgy debt issuance. But who would buy this stuff, asks John Stepek.

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Mauricio Macri: a big improvement over the populists
(Image credit: Credit: EFE News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo)

"Argentina's can't-miss offer to participate in its first non-deadbeat century." This headline on the Dealbreaker website greeted the news that South America's second-largest economy had issued a 100-year bond. Cynical maybe, but basically true. Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt eight times since independence in 1816, notes FT Alphaville. Three of those defaults were in the last 23 years alone. Yet investors piled in Argentina sold $2.75bn in debt and attracted $9.75bn in orders. Who would buy this stuff?

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.