Argentine president-elect wants 'tough' debt default talks

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine President-elect Mauricio Macri plans to push through economic reforms that will buy him time for a "tough negotiation" with U.S. hedge funds suing the South American country over unpaid sovereign debt, he told the daily Clarin newspaper.

The pro-business Macri, who narrowly won Sunday's presidential election, vows to get Argentina's stalled economy moving again but needs to settle a decade-long legal battle with the holdout creditors before he can return to global credit markets.

"We're not worried about this," Macri said in the interview published on Tuesday. "We want to bring policy solutions that give us time to establish a framework for a tough negotiation so that we can defend the rights of Argentines."

That will mean finding a quick way to bolster the central bank's dwindling foreign currency reserves, which have fallen to a nine-year low below $26 billion as outgoing President Cristina Fernandez battles to prop up the peso currency .

Macri campaigned on a promises of sweeping economic reforms to tackle weak growth, high inflation and a burgeoning fiscal deficit after more than a decade of free-spending leftist populism.

Macri told Clarin his government might issue debt to finance a backlog in payments for imports, estimated by economists at $8 billion.

Argentina's debt fight with New York hedge funds led by billionaire Paul Singer's Elliott Management plunged Latin America's No. 3 economy back into default last year. The holdouts rejected sharp haircuts on their bondholdings after Argentina's record 2002 default and demand full repayment.

Many Argentines supported leftist Fernandez's unflinching stance against the creditors and the U.S. judge who ruled in favor of the creditors, and Macri has said he will haggle hard in talks.

Elliott Management did not responded to several requests for comment since Macri's election win. A second complainant, Aurelius Capital Management, declined to comment on the election results.

The U.S. judge overseeing the litigation last month ruled in favor of complainants in 49 lawsuits seeking the same treatment as Elliott Management's NML Capital Ltd and Aurelius Capital.

(Reporting by Richard Lough and Sarah Marsh in Buenos Aires and Daniel Bases in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)

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