#deal guys

[sclly]

thereisamysteryinlife replied to your post:weirdcombination replied to your...

i’m with Gabi! I only been once in snow and I loved it!!!!!! and I want winter all year hahahaha

then both of you come to denmark!! i'll go to argentina or wherever, as long as it's hot!!

[whatthezeitgeistwants]

The Man Who Ate Argentina

At Businessweek, a terrific profile of the strange things that go on when nation-states borrow money from hedge funds and can't or won't make their gargantuan payments.  Very easy to unfurl the scenarios where a cabal of deal guys and technolibertarian seasteaders end up with their own country.

"Argentina's Vulture, Paul Singer, is Wall Street Freedom Fighter"

An earlier success may have emboldened Singer. He spent about $11 million on government-backed Peruvian bank debt in 1996, and Peru agreed in 2000 to pay him $58 million. That meant he got better than a 400 percent return. All it took was trips to court in the U.S., U.K., Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and Canada.

“He finds a country in distress, he buys its debt, he demands full payment, and he doesn’t care about the economics, the poverty, the circumstances of the country,” says Mark Cymrot, who represented Peru and is head of BakerHostetler’s international disputes group. “From his point of view, he would say, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ And you’d have to say he’s right. But I wouldn’t want to earn money that way myself.”

Singer began buying bonds before Argentina’s record $95 billion default in 2001. A string of five presidents in two weeks, an historic recession, and violence that killed at least 27 people didn’t turn him off. He kept buying defaulted debt at a deep discount. When most of Argentina’s creditors accepted strict offers in 2005 and 2010 to swap their bonds for about 30¢ on the dollar, Singer wasn’t among them. Instead, he won court claims to at least $1.7 billion from the country and embarked on a global quest to collect.

The voyage has been action-packed, though with a lot of legal consultants and arcane applications of little-known legal terms. In 2004, NML Capital, a Singer subsidiary based in the Cayman Islands, persuaded a judge to bar Argentina from selling four military warehouses it owned off a parkway in Maryland, freezing $3 million in buildings, motors, weapons, and a plane, according to an Argentine defense ministry spokesman. A lawyer for NML modestly said at the time that the order covered only real estate.

Singer managed to briefly seize an Argentine naval vessel in Ghana in 2012. After the three-mast training frigate was evacuated, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered it freed. The frigate sailed off. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner told her country that the vulture funds could try to take their boat, which happens to be named the ARA Libertad, but they wouldn’t touch Argentina’s “freedom, sovereignty, or dignity.”

[getmetotheairport]

Just walked/joggedbadly for half an hour rather than driving to get to the gym! Just finished a 3k bike ride on level six, took me 10 minutes which is my average. Would like to see that number decrease with time! Feeling good loving my cold water bottle right now and have 'dirty paws' by Of Monsters and Men on repeat! Love