reddit

“A brief history: as soon as he was elected, back in 2006, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa started making entirely-predictable noises about defaulting on his country's bonds. (He'd said he'd do just that throughout his presidential campaign.) For much of December 2006 and January 2007, speculation about an Ecuadorean default was rampant -- and there was even an announcement that the country was going to miss a coupon payment that February. But the coupon payment was made (prompting the classic headline "Ecuador's on-time bond payment confuses economists"), and later developments indicated that the whole thing was a way for Ecuador to manipulate the bond and CDS markets as secondary-market prices plunged to around 70 cents on the dollar.” source...