Source: The New York Times
By: Alexandra Stevenson
04.25.2016
The Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan has long been a location for secret diplomacy, but few meetings there would have seemed as unlikely as the one that took place one day in early December.
In a hotel conference room, a top Argentine politician drank coffee with two hedge fund executives — a meeting that was nothing short of remarkable after more than a decade of bitter legal skirmishes between Argentina and a group of disgruntled debt holders who at one point seized an Argentine Navy ship. The previous Buenos Aires government reviled the hedge funds as “vultures.”
That meeting on Dec. 7 between Luis Caputo, who days later would be sworn in as Argentina’s finance secretary, and Jonathan Pollock and Jay Newman from Elliott Management, the $27 billion hedge fund founded by Paul E. Singer, was the start of a rapprochement leading to a momentous debt deal that has now allowed Argentina to rejoin the global financial markets that it had been locked out of for 15 years.
Last week, Argentina successfully sold $16.5 billion in bonds to international investors, a record amount for any developing country. And on Friday, Elliott and the other bondholders finally received their reward in the form of billions of dollars in repayment, representing returns worth multiple times their original investments.
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