The economic harm being caused by the novel coronavirus may soon result in multiple sovereign debtors moving into default territory, but the existing playbook for dealing with multi-sovereign emerging market debt crises is blank. Currently, the only way to deal with a debt crisis is to carry out protracted country-by-country and contract-by-contract negotiated workouts. Expert groups are attempting to design a mechanism to run multiple sovereign debt workouts simultaneously but any design will take time to configure and get international buy-in. This article sets forth some options to provide temporary legal protection to debtor countries while they are diverting resources to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is the notion of ‘legal air cover’. The options we propose involve ex-post state intervention in debt contracts and come with risks, but we show that in the case of Greece, where such an intervention was necessary in 2012, there were no negative spillovers on periphery eurozone debt markets associated with the Greek ex-post modification of contract terms.

中文翻译：

---

法律航空保险

新型冠状病毒造成的经济损害可能很快导致多个主权债务人进入违约领域，但现有的应对多主权新兴市场债务危机的剧本是空白的。当前，应对债务危机的唯一途径是进行长期的逐国、逐个合同的谈判磨合。专家组正试图设计一种机制来同时运行多个主权债务解决方案，但任何设计都需要时间来配置和获得国际支持。本文提出了一些选项，以便在债务国转移资源以应对 Covid-19 大流行时为其提供临时法律保护。这就是“合法空中掩护”的概念。我们提出的选项涉及对债务合同的事后国家干预，并带有风险，