Word: defaulters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dubious honor, even for the most hard-line of Communist nations. But after months of negotiations, North Korea, the xenophobic workers' state run by Communist Leader Kim Il Sung, was publicly declared by capitalist bankers to be in default on its foreign debt. Reason: the Pyongyang government's failure to make payments on $770 million in obligations to two syndicates representing 140 banks. Other countries in the past have halted payment of debt but struck deals with foreign lenders, earning more favorable terms and fresh credits. In North Korea's case, says one European banker, "nobody in their right minds...
...default came after nine months of talks in London finally fizzled. North Korea has owed most of the money, which it used mainly to buy grain and heavy equipment and to build bridges and roads, since the early 1970s. The country has never repaid any principal; indeed, on several occasions, it also suspended debt repayments, only to work out more favorable terms with Japanese and Western creditors. But for the past three years, Pyongyang has refused even to meet interest charges. For a time it looked as if the banks and the North Koreans might work out another agreement...
...latest default could make life more austere in Kim's kingdom. Lawyers representing the creditor banks are already scouting for North Korean assets to seize, including reserves believed to be stashed in bank accounts in Switzerland, Austria, West Germany and elsewhere. There is speculation too that the creditors could try to intercept the shipments of gold, worth about $27 million each, that Pyongyang sells each month through the London bullion market. Juche, in other words, could encompass even harder times ahead...
...conventions of travel writing, the patterns of the philosophical essay and the strategies of fiction. The work is obviously based on fact and personal experience, although Chatwin declares that much of it is literary concoction. In short, The Songlines is a book whose resistance to definition places it, by default, into the increasingly liberal category of the novel...
...result of that move, many economics experts now think the so-called Baker Plan for developing economies is essentially dead. The Treasury Secretary, however, remains sanguine. He lauded Citicorp's debt write-off, for example, as a "positive" step. One reason: the approach reduces the likelihood of wholesale default by debtor nations...