Speakers:

• Lee Buchheit, Professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Augusto de la Torre, Director, Economics Research Center, Universidad de las Américas, Ecuador
• Susan Segal, President and CEO, Americas Society/Council of the Americas (introduction)

“We may be on the cusp of a systemic sovereign debt crisis of the kind we haven’t seen since the 1980s, where you have multiple countries forced to restructure their sovereign debt simultaneously,” said Lee Buchheit at the AS/COA panel. “None of us knows when this pandemic will abate, none of us can be sure what the world economy will look like, but if the situation turns out to be as gristly as the IMF seems to think it might be, we could have 10, 15, 20, 25 countries forced into a debt restructuring more or less at the same time.” Buchheit compared and contrasted the current scenario with the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, in the aftermath of which 27 countries globally were forced to restructure their sovereign debt.

The experts then touched on Ecuador’s debt restructuring process of 2008, "a case where a country did not pay and it could have paid,” as Augusto de la Torre described it. “Then-President Rafael Correa had run on a platform in which he said he was going to obtain significant debt relief in the country if he was elected,” said Buchheit, who added that if any financial officer had used the same moves as Correa, he or she would have ended up in prison. It was a “morally wrong outcome” said Buchheit, who also discussed so-called “odious debt” as it related to the Correa administration. Regarding other South American countries, Buchheit gave an overview of Uruguay's aggregated clause strategy of 2003 and noted that Argentina has recently revised its offer “very considerably in favor of the creditors.”

Speakers:

• Julie Gerberding, Executive Vice President and Chief Patient Officer, Strategic Communications, Global Public Policy, and Population Health, Merck
• Jan Van Acker, President, Emerging Markets Human Health, Merck (introduction)
• Eric Farnsworth, Vice President, Americas Society/Council of the Americas (welcome)

The world has a choice to make as we face the COVID-19 pandemic: do we just work to get through this and then collapse back to “business as usual”? Or can we do more than survive and strive to be better prepared societies? Infectious disease expert and Merck executive Dr. Julie Gerberding made a compelling case for the latter in her remarks at a virtual event, part of the AS/COA Healthcare series. “Health security is national security,” said the former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2002–2009). “If we don’t prioritize our investments, we have no national security," she said. "It is just as important as military spending and our national defense when it comes to improving and protecting the lives of citizens on a day-to-day basis.” Gerberding also discussed the need for public and private investment and attention to continue and improve that preparedness both before and after an immediate threat. “We have to sustain the effort, even when the emergency effort subsides,” she said.