YPF Restructure Fails After Argentina Runs Out Of Dollars -- Bloomberg -- January 19, 2021

Bloomberg headline: shale driller stuns bondholders as Argentina runs out of dollars.

Previously posted. Deserves a stand-alone post. Huge story.

• Argentina shale driller runs out of money; biggest story of the day? YPF; writer at the link seems surprised; I always thought Argentina shale potential was exaggerated; I had forgotten about the nationalization in 2012;
  

From the article:

In the 99 years since it was founded to pump the oil fields of Patagonia, Argentine energy driller YPF SA has been whipsawed by countless booms and busts. If global oil markets weren’t collapsing, it seemed, then Argentina was mired in a debt crisis that was wreaking havoc on the whole nation’s finances.

Never, though, had the company been pushed into a large-scale default of any kind. Until, it would appear, now. Word of this came in an odd way: Officials at state-run YPF sent a press release in the dead of night laying out a plan to saddle creditors with losses in a debt exchange.

Implicit in its statement was a threat that traders immediately understood -- failure to reach a restructuring deal could lead to a flat-out suspension of debt payments -- and they began frantically unloading the shale driller’s bonds the next morning. Today, some two weeks later, the securities trade as low as 56 cents on the dollar.

Creditors, including BlackRock Inc. and Howard Marks’s Oaktree Capital Group, are gearing up for bare-knuckled negotiations just four months after ironing out a restructuring deal with the government that marked the country’s third sovereign default this century alone.

YPF’s downfall underscores just how hard the pandemic has hammered both the global oil industry and the perennially hobbled Argentine economy. Dollars are now so scarce in Buenos Aires that the central bank refused to let YPF buy the full amount it needed to pay notes coming due in March. That was the immediate cause of the restructuring announcement.

A longer view reveals a steady decline in the company’s finances since the government re-nationalized it in 2012 and forced it to swell payrolls, artificially hold down domestic fuel prices and skimp on investments, leading to four straight years of oil-and-gas output declines.