When unique is just such a relative term

Remember how the technology boom wasn’t a bubble at all, because this time things were different? Bankers love telling people how certain events are unique and unprecedented. Most of the time, though, they’re wrong.

In March, for instance, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs annouced with enormous fanfare a new Mexican global bond. (Euromoney, April 2003, pp 124-128). Finally, for the first time ever, a bond issued under New York law would have collective action clauses (CACs) in its documentation, and would make it into the most important emerging-market bond index, the EMBI Global.