


The recently-announced $50 billion loan package from the G7 nations to Ukraine fell short of the $300 billion or so hoped for by the designers of its framework. The structure that the G7 used, though, was an elegant way of enabling risk sharing among a set of nations increasingly unable to justify to their populations the risk of individualized lending to Ukraine. If the structure used for the current package works (which is yet to be seen), it could enable greater levels of assistance to nations in need in the future. To that end, it is useful to understand the historical origins of the structure underlying the current loan package, which go back to the Iran and Falklands crises more than forty years ago.