The Importance of Being Standard

Contract standardisation serves many important functions in the sovereign debt market: among these, it saves time and money in preparing documents and endows widely-used terms with a shared public meaning, which in turn saves investors the costs of acquiring information, facilitates secondary market trading and reduces the scope for mistakes in the judicial interpretation of contract terms. Sovereign debt issuers and investors claim to value standardisation and list it as an important contractual objective. Issuers generally insist that their bond contracts are standard and reflect market practice. Variations from past practice and market norm must be explained in disclosure documents and through market outreach. Standardisation is not just part of the fabric of market expectations: international policy initiatives to prevent and manage financial crises rest on the assumption that sovereign debt contracts follow a generally accepted standard. Such initiatives would make no sense in the absence of standardisation.