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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Bond investors are warming to a host of countries locked out of international markets for the past two years, raising hopes that a debt crisis in the developing world may be starting to ease.
A global bond rally over the past two months, in anticipation of interest rate cuts in the US and other big economies, has swept up riskier debt as investors seek higher returns.
The resulting fall in borrowing costs has helped to pull countries out of debt distress, commonly defined as a dollar-borrowing cost more than 10 percentage points higher than that of US Treasuries, which in effect bars a government from issuing new debt.
Ten nations — Angola, Egypt, El Salvador, Gabon, Iraq, Kenya, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tajikistan — have now seen their borrowing spreads fall below this threshold since 2022.
That…
