Mozambique is an African country which is not in Australian news all that often, if at all. It is described as “one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world” in Wikipedia, the result of nearly 20 years of civil war after it gained independence from Portugal.
This week its woes got a little worse, although its citizen are possibly past caring. Mozambique’s finance ministry announced it would not pay the January coupon on its 10.5% January 2023 bond which is denominated in USD. The country is now officially in default and it has stated it will struggle to make debt payments during the rest of 2017.
Depending on how default is defined, we should not be too surprised; Mozambique was in default for about ten years from the early 1980s to the early 1990s.
