inadvertent generosity

there is an interesting side effect of the dollar's recent pronounced decline

a lot of countries, especially smaller, poorer countries, finance their public debt in dollar bonds - the loan is in dollars, and so is the repayment, but the funds to make the payment ultimately come out of local revenue

so, in driving down the US dollar, a lot of countries have an opportunity to write off a significant fraction of their public debt, eg by converting to euro bonds - if the central banks can pull it off, get refinancing, and if they time it right (incorrect timing just reinflates the debt in local currency)
this can also drive positive feedback, as countries get non-US credit and use it to pay off dollar debt - if you held a dollar bond now, and someone offered to pay it off and give you some rapidly appreciating euros (or loonies or yen etc), there is some incentive to take it while the going is good...

this is uncommonly generous

I eagerly await explanations of how I completely misunderstand international bond markets...
my understanding of the process goes back to the decades when Iceland played this game and did it badly

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A relative of mine just sent me the following brainteaser. Since it never hurts to flex one's mental muscles, I thought I'd pass it along:
In the land of the euro, the dollar is treated like a banana republic(an) currency. The devaluation of the dollar isn't such an awful thing: it was long overdue.
When I was a little kid I used to take a pair of dice and throw these dice repeatedly. At each throw I'd fill in a box for the corresponding number on some graph paper and I would essentially "race" the numbers against each other.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of each, I suppose. When I was a young man, traveling in Europe was great for Americans. For starters, everybody didn't hate us (thanks George!). For another, everything was cheap. The dollar was strong so the exchange rate favored us.

And almost all countries that tried to switch from dollar to euro over the past decade got bombed by the US military - wonder why?

Well, to start with the bonds would have to be callable. If they were issued without any contractual provision allowing the issuer to terminate them early, the holders can just turn down any such offer (in the Argentinian case a few years back the government defaulted on its coupon payments, so a renegotiation was forced under duress).

Why would they? Maybe because they know that currency markets tend to overshoot, think that the dollar decline is getting out of hand, that the euro is getting way overvalued, and that if they were to switch now they would be selling at or near the bottom. Works both ways.