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This article analyzes the controversies about the legitimate mechanisms for the regulation of sovereign bankruptcy and sheds light on the resilience of the instruments and the actors that ensure the continuity of the global economic order at the legal and financial levels. Twice – first in 2002 at the initiative of the International Monetary Fund, and then in 2015 at the UN General Assembly – the alternatives to regulation through the financial markets, which aimed at establishing a supranational legal mechanism, have been disqualified. Based upon the analysis of some of the actors and institutions that are constitutive of international economic governance, this article sheds light on the consolidation of the economic order and on its underpinnings. Contrarily to what one may spontaneously imagine, states are not exclusively “victims” of globalized debt markets and of the vulture funds that refuse the renegotiation of debts and trigger procedures that would allow them to claim full reimbursements. In the name of their financial attractiveness and of their access to globalized capital markets, the treasury departments of various emerging states comply with the contractual formats imposed by foreign financial markets and accept a restriction of their sovereign powers.