Posted by Brian Olden
The 7th IMF Debt Managers Forum, hosted by the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, was held in the IMF’s HQ building in Washington D.C. between November 5th and 6th. This two day event was attended by leading public debt managers from advanced and emerging market economies, participants from the financial markets, including leading investment banks and hedge funds and other international financial institutions.
Many interesting topics were discussed including the effects of the recent credit crunch on sovereign debt management and issuance strategies, trends in the composition of public debt portfolios, use of derivatives to assist in the implementation of debt management strategies, asset and liability management strategies and the issue of sub-national and public enterprise debt management.
The involvement of private sector financial market participants was useful as they were able to provide some commentary on the credit crises and their take on how this would affect , issuance spreads for sovereign issuers over the short to medium-term. Most of the participants were relatively optimistic about the prospects for emerging markets but perhaps less so about the more advanced economies. The most interesting message from the Forum was the view that, for once, this was a crisis that had originated in the advanced economies and that the affect on emerging markets was proving much less severe than has been the case in other international financial crises of recent years. Lack of exposure of domestic financial institutions to the sub-prime mortgage market and the improvement in the fiscal management of emerging markets has insulated these economies from the worst effects and this has been reflected in the relatively mild reaction of investors to EM sovereign debt as evidenced by the relatively mild widening of spreads in binds issued by these countries.
The attached note highlights the main areas of discussion in more detail. [Download highlight_7th_imf_debt_forum_2007.DOC]
