Governments that are both cash-strapped and already indebted have always had the odds stacked against them. What is a country supposed to do when it’s rejected by the usual sources of credit, but its expenditures continue to pile up? Traditionally, the only answer has been to seek debt alleviation with private and public creditors. But governments that have the advantage of being resource-rich have always had another potential answer: raising loans against future resource production—loans that don’t count as sovereign debt.
