Because Germany was and remains one of Russia's biggest sources of foreign lending, Mr. Kohler frequently sparred with the United States over how countries would divide the burden of refinancing or writing off old loans.
At the workshop Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a model of the American housing market, inspired by ABM approaches, which showed how a fateful conjunction of rising house prices, falling interest rates and easy access to refinancing created an awesome burden of debt.
This involved exchanging some $29.5 billion in mainly short-term debt for newly issued bonds which expire after 2005.The urgent thing was that, before the swap, Argentina had looked unable to refinance the heavy burden of debt due to expire in the next five years and would, perhaps sooner rather than later, have defaulted.
To accomplish that, he negotiated a £360m refinancing package in order to slash Johnston's debt burden by more than a third (down to £197m).
Refinancing or selling were the only ways to escape the debt burdens, but these options were only viable when the housing market was growing.
Taylor Wimpey needs to refinance its £1.9bn debt burden.
Switzer and Merriman still need to refinance a huge debt burden, now just under $800 million.
Consider refinancing your student loan if possible, which won't eliminate your debt but may ease the burden.
Some of the burden could be eased, the bureau said, if borrowers could lower their monthly payments by refinancing their private loans at current, low interest rates.
Refinancing requires some equity.
