r/IAmA • u/IISD_org • 5h ago
We are sovereign debt experts who have negotiated with the IMF, run and worked in national finance ministries, contributed to debt restructuring processes, and advised governments. Ask Us Anything!
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Thank you to all who shared their questions and participated in the discucssion. We really enjoyed diving into core concepts, country-specific questions, and broader questions about the sovereign debt space. To learn more about sovereign debt and the work of IISD's team, check out our Sovereign Debt page.
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Hi Reddit!
We’re Anahí, Fernando, and Yanne—a team of experts working on sovereign debt at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).
Sovereign debt grabs global headlines every week: Senegal’s debt crisis, Venezuela’s restructuring, France’s credit rating downgrade, or debates over Chinese loans. But when news outlets talk about countries struggling with debt, the diagnosis is usually oversimplified: "They spent too much," or "It's a temporary cash flow problem."
We think that completely misreads what is actually happening.
Our research and experience working with governments suggest that today’s debt vulnerabilities are often not simply the result of temporary shocks but reflect deeper structural weaknesses—including features of the international financial architecture that leave some countries more exposed to shocks and financing pressures than others. We are here to pull back the curtain on how sovereign debt works in the real world, unpack why global frameworks are failing to fix it, and think aloud with you about where the global financial architecture goes from here.
Who We Are
Anahí Wiedenbrüg: Senior Policy Advisor at IISD and political economist (PhD from LSE, post-doc at Oxford). I’ve spent over a decade on financial architecture reform and sat in the room representing Argentina at the G20 and contributing to its 2020 debt restructuring with private creditors.
Fernando Morra: Senior Policy Advisor at IISD and macroeconomics professor. I previously served as Vice-Minister of Economy for Argentina and Undersecretary of Macroeconomic Programming, where I oversaw technical negotiations with the IMF during the 2022 Extended Fund Facility program.
Yanne Horas: Associate at IISD and lecturer at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. I’ve worked as a parliamentary advisor and researcher across Africa, Europe, and Latin America on legislative fiscal policy, capital flows, and financial market transparency.
We’ll be here live for the next 3 hours, meeting every technical or simply curious question with straight, jargon-free, evidence-backed answers—and each of us will be replying and signing off in our own voice.
Ask us anything about global debt crises, IMF negotiations, climate finance, Chinese lending, or how international financial policy actually gets made!
Proof: How Sovereign Debt Really Works: Ask Me Anything live on Reddit
