Mike W aced the last one - the three most famous admirals ending in "-itz" are of course Tirp, Dön and Nim.
Right. Our next Short List is "Countries which have never devalued their currency; 'restructured' or defaulted on their national debt; taken a bridging loan from the IMF; accepted soft loans/grants under Lend/Lease, Marshall Plan, or from World Bank or EU; received overseas aid; nationalised foreign-owned assets etc."
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Short Lists
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13 comments:
Thanks Mark,
No navy background though - Indeed, I once felt sea sick sea fishing from Deal Pier!
This time I shall help the team. In my Reinhart and Rogoff,there is a rather nice chapter and table...
Best,
Mike W
Switzerland? United States? Singapore? Monaco? Liechtenstein?
MW, see if they mention any.
JT, rule out USA, they aren't averse to massive devaluations when it suits them. Monaco and FL aren't really countries.
Singapore has only been a country for half a century, they appear to have played it with a straight bat in the late 1990s South East Asian doolally.
Switzerland, good one, I'll have to think about that. They did help themselves to a fair bit of Nazi gold and third world aid though (the dictators put their money there), and they launder money for drugs dealers, which is a form of international aid, so they are not squeaky clean
I've got the R&R book and I think it flatters their definition of 'default' a bit. Certainly wouldn't apply to this definition.
I doubt there is one under the MW definition.
Bhutan?
Hmmm. Australia?
Seen in the nineties - the claim that only three countries have a usefully long run of not defaulting on Govt debt - UK (strictly, I suppose England/GB/UK), Sweden, Switzerland. The UK fails much of the rest of the tests, which leaves just the other two and sundry Johnny-come-latelies.
But, you must remember that as result (I presume) of their indoctrination into their national myths, many Americans believe that the US has never defaulted, whereas she did so as recently as FDR.
Sweden, Switzerland and Canada I'm guessing.
Fair point above Steve L,
Does Mark need to tell us if 'never' means this century, last century post 1945 or when?
My reading was the bit of RR that lists external debt default, then I would guess from memory who had taken Marshall aid and see what was left.
Not a lot.
'One of the fascinating questions raised in our book is why a relatively small number of countries, such as...have managed to avoid defaults on central government debt to foreign creditors..'
RR p.xxx
Hope this clarifies.
My first guess would have been Denmark, but they took the Marshall Aid after the war I think.
Best,
Mike W
SL, Mike W, tell me what the RR book says, I'd be interested to know.
B, is that a country or a kind of gas?
AC, is that your final answer?
R, yup, Canada and Australia seem to have a good reputations.
D, that's more like it. UK has never missed a penny of interest or capital payments, but our secret weapons are fear, surprise, devaluations and inflation.
Mike W, should we have a cut off point historically? I can see the appeal, but what about really new countries like Czech Rep, Slovak Rep? They haven't been going long enough to really deserve a reputation either way.
Did Denmark keep up interest and capital repayments during WW2? I don't know.
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So Sweden, Canada and Australia go through to the next round, I suppose.
Without dusting it down it classes 'external debt' as debt under the terms of a foreign creditor and 'domestic' debt nder the terms of the government debtor.
It lists defaults in this context but doesn't class the UK pulling out of the gold standard as an external default which is debatable IMO.
It also classes inflation crises differently again, although it dicusses them in the context of a domestic default it doesn't class them as such.
It also discusses how patchy the data is on domestic defaults as you could say tht the government going back on any kind of promise is a default.
It reckons the UK has not defaulted in a couple of hundred years, but it could be argued we defaulted several times in the interwar and post WW2 periods.
It's the sort of book you'd like MW, meaty data appendices and lots of graphs. Even tried to catalogue every single banking crisis.
Hey, you can't rule out Bhutan just because you don't know what it is. (hint - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan) Does it make the grade or not?
SL, I'll track it down a copy and read it.
B, OK, it's a country. Does it have any government debt in the first place?
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