The United States government has weighed in on the legal battle between Argentina and a group of New York hedge funds, lending its support to the struggling country and dealing a setback to the investors, the New York Times reported today. In an amicus curiae brief filed on Wednesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, the Justice Department said that it supported an American federal judge’s decision to lift an injunction that had prevented Argentina from raising new money in the bond markets or paying its creditors. “The United States has significant foreign policy interests in support of a swift resolution of this long-running litigation,” the Justice Department said in the brief. It is a move that will increase the pressure on a group of holdout bondholders that refused to take part in two debt restructurings by Argentina after it defaulted on $100 billion of debt in 2001.
