Most came quietly in the end. After a tortuous process, the majority of private holders of Greek government bonds had agreed by March 9th to trade in their bonds for new longer-dated ones with less than half the face value of the old ones and a low interest rate. The biggest sovereign-debt restructuring in history allowed Greece to wipe some €100 billion ($130 billion) from its debts of around €350 billion. It will also be the first test of the resilience of the financial system to the payment on sovereign bonds of credit-default swaps (cdss), a form of insurance against bad debts.
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