The Republic of the Philippines completed a sovereign debt exchange on Friday, accepting $1.2 billion of bonds tendered and issuing a new $1.3 billion global offering with a seven-year maturity.
Critics of the exchange had two main issues. Firstly, a number could not understand why the sovereign was doing an exchange offering at all. Given the large amount of funding it needs to raise in a year of heightened political risk, should it not be more mindful of finding available market windows rather than waste time tinkering with its yield curve
And secondly, many could not understand the point of an exchange that barely extended the Republic's maturity profile and did...
