A sovereign never has just one future.
I'm Milo Gunasinghe, an emerging market sovereign credit strategist. I map the paths a country can take, from stress to default to recovery, across Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and tell investors, journalists and policymakers which one the market is mispricing.
Three rooms, one job: make the sovereign story clear enough to act on.
Most of the work sits where macro, politics, debt mechanics and market pricing collide. The value is in stripping it back to what moves the bonds, without losing the nuance that still matters for positioning.
A cleaner read on where sovereign risk is mispriced.
Debt sustainability and restructuring scenarios, relative value across sovereign and quasi-sovereign curves, and tactical ideas for benchmark and total-return money across emerging markets, from the frontiers up.
Fast context when a sovereign starts to crack.
What is actually moving, where the pressure points are, and why fixed income is reacting the way it is. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Financial Times through the Sri Lanka crisis.
Where debt mechanics and market pricing finally meet.
Restructuring terms, recovery values, official-creditor dynamics and state-contingent instrument design, from Sri Lanka and the Maldives to Senegal, Ethiopia and Zambia.
Sri Lanka, before the consensus got there.
Flagged the external financing squeeze while the market was still pricing willingness to pay. Stayed with the story through the 2022 default, the domestic debt exercise, the official-creditor deals and the bondholder agreement.
Now the coverage is the post-deal trajectory: the new instruments, including the macro-linked bonds, and what the next leg means for the people who hold them. The same anatomy has since played out in Ghana, Zambia and Ethiopia, and in slow motion in Senegal. The toolkit travels.
Global emerging markets, with the frontier depth most desks skip.
Ten years across both halves of the EM map: local rates and FX in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa from London, then a sovereign credit franchise built from Hong Kong, with the African workouts running through both.
The board is organised by situation, not region, because that's how the work is actually done. The mechanics of a workout in Colombo are the mechanics of a workout in Lusaka.
Distress, default, restructuring and the trade after the deal. Highlighted names are where the desk's calls moved the conversation.
Sovereign curves against each other, state-owned and policy-bank curves against the sovereign, debut deals, and the pickup worth taking versus the pickup that isn't.
Gulf issuers, North Asia, oil and tariff transmission, China policy, and the flows and technicals that set the tone for the whole complex.
Quantitative where it earns its place. In the room where it doesn't.
A strategist's edge is rarely the obvious story. It's spotting what the market is misreading, and that takes models, field time and, increasingly, tooling most desks don't have yet.
Debt sustainability and restructuring scenarios.
Scenario trees around an IMF baseline, recovery values across a range of exit yields, and the design of the instruments themselves, macro-linked bonds included.
Cross-market scorecards and technicals.
Relative value across sovereign and quasi-sovereign curves, plus the flows, positioning and supply picture that decides whether a good idea has a bid.
Roadshows, IMF meetings, country trips.
Annual circuits through London, Singapore and the US East Coast, more than seventy investor calls a year, repeat meetings in Washington, and time on the ground in the countries that matter.
Builds the research tooling, not just the research.
Leads the desk's agentic AI build-out: systematised relative-value screening, client-view analytics and research workflows that cut days to hours. A strategist who ships code is still rare. That's the point.
Quoted when it counted.
A selection of public references, dated, so you can see when the view was on the record relative to the event.
Political economy by training. Markets by temperament.
Political science and political economy at the LSE, then straight into the markets: J.P. Morgan in London, on local rates and FX across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, leading the frontier names in sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and Pakistan. That's where the habit of pricing a sovereign's politics started.
Hong Kong followed: sole Asia sovereign credit strategist at J.P. Morgan, then, from 2023, an Asia macro and sovereign credit franchise built from a standing start into a market-leading frontier desk at a US investment bank. The African workouts never left the desk. Along the way, ranked in Institutional Investor's sovereign debt strategy polls on both sides of the map, for Asia and for emerging EMEA.
Italian, British and Sri Lankan, and fluent in all three. The Sri Lanka call was never only professional. Outside the screen: long runs, late dinners, gallery openings, and conversations that drift between macro, politics and Hong Kong life.
For rooms that want the sovereign story clear enough to act on.
Investor mandates, media requests, panels and private forums on emerging market sovereign credit, from Asia to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the workout mechanics behind them. Usually a reply within two business days. If it's time-sensitive, say so up front.