In the absence of a global bankruptcy court for sovereign debt, crises leading to debt restructurings have evolved within an imperfect architecture mired in creditor coordination problems. These challenges are now part of a permacrisis of interconnected global dysfunction that defies existing institutions and their approaches to tackling recurrent problems. The chapter reviews the ways in which debt restructurings have taken place since the 1980s: from the securitization of commercial bank loans to financial fragility and new defaults on sovereign bonds. The costs of default have been compounded by the risks of litigation in foreign courts brought about by a minority of creditors. In the shadow of failed attempts to institute a statutory mechanism for resolving sovereign debt disputes, “market-based” contractual changes have become the norm. However inventive and incremental, these do not preclude some creditors from trying to leverage contract provisions to disrupt restructurings and extract larger repayments from debtors. Without fundamental change brought about by global cooperation, ad hoc ingenuity has had to make do. The past is thus condemned to remain an insufficient prologue to a future where sovereign debt restructurings are a predictable part of an ever-confounding permacrisis.