Book Launch: “Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring” by Gregory Makoff.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
6:00-8:00 PM
Offices of Eni S.p.A., 601 13th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20005, Suite 700

Refreshments will be provided. Books will not be for sale at the event, but are for sale on Amazon.

Register using the form below.

Please join the Washington Foreign Law Society (WFLS) for a reception to launch Gregory Makoff’s new book, “Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring.” The book describes the fifteen year conflict over Argentina’s 2001 default that led to a decade of litigation in U.S.courts and remade the legal framework for sovereign debt financing. The turning point in this drama was the unprecedented injunction by a U.S. court barring U.S. banks from paying consenting creditors who agreed to a deep haircut until Argentina paid the holdout creditors in full. 

Mark Feldman will join Mr. Makoff to discuss how the structure of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act compounded the problems.   

Speaker/author: Gregory Makoff

Gregory Makoff is a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. A physicist by training, he worked at Citigroup Global Markets, 1993-2014, as an advisor to companies, financial institutions, and countries regarding their debt. During 2015-2016 he worked at the U.S. Treasury on the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. Since 2015 he has been writing about sovereign debt as a nonresident senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a think tank based in Waterloo, Ontario.

Interviewer: Mark B Feldman

Mark B. Feldman has been engaged in U.S. foreign relations law and transnational litigation since1965, at the U.S. Department of State, teaching at Georgetown Law and extensive private practice. As Deputy and Acting Legal Adviser (1974-81), he played a major role in drafting the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and the Iran Claims Agreement, and negotiated the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property as well as U.S. maritime boundaries with Canada, Cuba and Mexico. In practice, Mark argued for the United States in the Gulf of Maine Maritime Boundary Case at the ICJ and established the treaty exception to the federal act of state doctrine in Kalamazoo Spice v Ethiopia. He recently published “Footnotes to History: Law and Diplomacy, 1965-2005” (Xlibris 2023).