Category: Loans

One of the central issues in the current Zambian debt crisis is a lack of transparency that makes it largely impossible for investors, policymakers, and constituents on all sides to know what's really going on. The Chinese government and creditors are among the worst in this regard. ...

The Zambian government, according to Reuters, says it's doing "everything possible" to avoid defaulting on billions of dollars of Eurobonds, including acceding to investor demands that it reveal the extent of its Chinese loan portfolio. “We’ve given all the information that needs to ...

The influential financial newspaper Business Daily published a sharply-worded editorial on Wednesday that blasted the government for taking on more debt amid the country's worsening economic crisis. "The implications of the rapid accumulation of debt are stark. The rising repayments are ...

London-based emerging markets strategist Gregory Smith posted an interesting thread on Twitter today that compared China's lending patterns in Africa to those of other emerging markets, particularly from the Persian Gulf region. Using World Bank charts, he showed that Chinese lending ...

After Angola and Zambia, Kenya is high on the list of countries at risk of encountering severe debt distress due in part to extensive borrowing from China to fund major infrastructure projects like the Standard Gauge Railway and, more recently, its seemingly insatiable appetite for more debt.  ...

Zambia's Secretary to the Treasury Fredson K. Yamba announced that his office has reached a debt restructuring agreement with the China Development Bank on one of its loans. It's important to note that the statement explicitly mentions a single loan and does not refer to CDB's broader loan portfolio ...

In less than three weeks, a group of Zambian bondholders, mostly in New York and London, will reconvene to vote on whether or not to approve Lusaka's request for a six-month repayment holiday on about $3 billion of Eurobond notes that are coming due. ...

Zambia owes $27 billion to external creditors rather than the $12 billion figure that is widely circulated in the media, according to Brad Setser's reading of World Bank data on external debt. Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, explained in ...

China's ambassador to South Africa, Chen Xiaodong, took a swipe at U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien's recent accusations that Chinese loans to African governments are predatory. Even though the event where O'Brien made the comments took place ...

Bradley Parks, executive director of AidData, discussed the preliminary findings of a new investigation into the terms and conditions of Chinese loan contracts around the world. AidData researchers studied 83 Chinese loan contracts to 21 low-and-middle income countries. The contracts involved the ...

Zambia's private creditors gave the embattled country an additional three weeks to come up with a plan on how to resolve its burgeoning debt crisis. A group of bondholders would have voted yesterday on whether to accept the finance ministry's request for a 6-month repayment ...