Dark Debt

“[A] WONDERFULLY COMPELLING RELUCTANT VAMPIRE HEROINE.”— USA Today Bestselling Author Julie Kenner Between standing Sentinel of Cadogan house and making society appearances with House Master Ethan Sullivan, a new member of the American Association of Vampires, Merit has her hands full. The last thing she needs is trouble, especially of the deadly kind. But when an old friend shows up in need, Merit can’t refuse. Morgan Greer, Master of House Navarre, has gotten himself into serious debt with a dangerous Chicago crime syndicate known as the Triad. And they’re willing to exact more than a pound of flesh for payback—unless Merit can find a way to stop them. Only the Triad’s connections go deeper than Merit knows, and even one wrong move could be her last…

Explores debt as a central historical component of religion, literature, and societal structure, while examining the idea of humanity's debt to the natural world.

Most companies work hard to avoid costly failures, but in complex systems a better approach is to embrace and learn from them. Through chaos engineering, you can proactively hunt for evidence of system weaknesses before they trigger a crisis. This practical book shows software developers and system administrators how to plan and run successful chaos engineering experiments. System weaknesses go beyond your infrastructure, platforms, and applications to include policies, practices, playbooks, and people. Author Russ Miles explains why, when, and how to test systems, processes, and team responses using simulated failures on Game Days. You’ll also learn how to work toward continuous chaos through automation with features you can share across your team and organization. Learn to think like a chaos engineer Build a hypothesis backlog to determine what could go wrong in your system Develop your hypotheses into chaos engineering experiment Game Days Write, run, and learn from automated chaos experiments using the open source Chaos Toolkit Turn chaos experiments into tests to confirm that you’ve overcome the weaknesses you discovered Observe and control your automated chaos experiments while they are running

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The book sheds light on the perhaps most important legal conundrum in the context of sovereign debt restructuring: the holdout creditor problem. Absent an international bankruptcy regime for sovereigns, holdout creditors may delay or even thwart the efficient resolution of sovereign debt crises by leveraging contractual provisions and, in an increasing number of cases, by seeking to enforce a debt claim against the sovereign in courts or international tribunals. Following an introduction to sovereign debt and its restructuring, the book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the holdout creditor problem in the context of the two largest sovereign debt restructuring operations in history: the Argentine restructurings of 2005 and 2010 and the 2012 Greek private sector involvement. By reviewing numerous lawsuits and arbitral proceedings initiated against Argentina and Greece across a dozen different jurisdictions, it distils the organizing principles for ongoing and future cases of sovereign debt restructuring and litigation. It highlights the different approaches judges and arbitrators have adopted when dealing with holdout creditors, ranging from the denial of their contractual right to repayment on human rights grounds to leveraging the international financial infrastructure to coerce governments into meeting holdouts’ demands. To this end, it zooms in on the role the governing law plays in sovereign debt restructurings, revisits the contemporary view on sovereign immunity from suit and enforcement in the international debt context, and examines how creditor rights are balanced with the sovereign’s interest in achieving debt sustainability. Finally, it advances a new genealogy of holdouts, distinguishing between official and private sector holdouts and discussing how the proliferation of new types of uncooperative creditors may affect the sovereign debt architecture going forward. While the book is aimed at practitioners and scholars dealing with sovereign debt and its restructuring, it should also provide the general reader with the understanding of the key legal issues facing countries in debt distress. Moreover, by weaving economic, financial, and political considerations into its analysis of holdout creditor litigation and arbitration, the book also speaks to policymakers without a legal background engaged in the field of international finance and economics.

Is one born with his destiny or does he forge it? In the mystical land of Gaya, two prophecies bind the fate of men and empires alike. The Destroyer born from the royal seed on the Land of the Setting Sun shall bring the empires down, or so has been foretold. In between the Destroyer and the world stand the Seven Guardians of Gaya, guarding the realm of man. A king, a father, defies the Seven and fate itself to save the last drop of his blood and prince Agni grows in the Land of the Rising Sun, exiled from his own people, unaware of his past. Losing the woman he loved most to the shadows in the dark, Agni is thrown into a whirlpool of events that he neither knows, nor understands. His quest for vengeance brings him to the doorstep of a secret that will shatter the very foundation of beliefs of a world. Can Agni avert his destiny? Can he uncover the truth about the Seven and the prophecies, now hidden behind a veil of ignorance? The Secrets of the Dark are sometimes so terrible that they are better left unsaid.

Debt levels, both private and public, were already at record highs before the Covid-19 pandemic, and surged further in 2020. The high indebteness raises concerns whether it will undermine future growth prospects. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate by examining what happens to economic growth after debt surges. We apply a local projection method to a new dataset of debt surges in 190 countries between 1970 and 2020. Our results show that the relationship between debt surges and economic growth are complex. Debt surges tend to be followed by weaker economic growth and persistently lower output. However, this negative relationship does not always hold. Surges in public debt tend to have the most negative impact on future growth prospects. This is particularly the case if the economy is already operating with a large positive output gap. Debt surges also tend to be followed by weaker economic growth if the initial debt levels are high, especially for private debt surges. Our results also show how debt surges impact future growth. Public debt surges are associated with especially weaker private and public investment, although both private and public consumption are also negatively affected. Surges in corporate debt are followed by lower private and public investment.