The Euro Zone s Default Position

(a) Settling all indebtedness to the United Nations

Real debt defaults are historically rare.

Unable to repay their loans, they kill themselves.

Even private debt payment mechanisms via courts didn t work.

Be patient with me, my dear country, at this time, for the sake of paying the debts.

Be patient with me, my dear country, at this time for the sake of paying off the debts.

The proposed mechanism distinguishes between illiquidity, impending insolvency, and full insolvency.

Sri Lanka and Indonesia have benefited from the tsunami debt moratorium.

In a domestic setting, bankruptcy and default are common.

Avoiding default may be possible, but it will not be easy.

Private sector deleveraging has barely begun.

They know that debt default would be disruptive.

Paying down private and public debt simultaneously depresses growth.

But, for the most part, the sovereign default process is slow motion Kabuki theater.

After all, in the last decade or so, Russia, Argentina, and Ecuador defaulted on their public debts, while Pakistan, Ukraine, and Uruguay coercively restructured their public debt under the threat of default.

Some countries are almost inevitably going to experience bailouts and defaults.

Portugal might follow Greece in a sovereign default and in leaving the eurozone.

A US Congress engaged in political grandstanding might fail to raise the debt ceiling, triggering a technical default.

BEIJING In the last 200 years, there have been more than 250 cases of sovereign debt default, and 68 cases of domestic debt default.

Countries never default because they can t pay their debts there are always ways to decrease expenditures or raise taxes.

But the buyback can succeed only if the market perceives it as the last chance before a unilateral debt restructuring. In other words, a successful buyback is a preamble to default.

US states entered their new union with different debt loads and different capacities to service them.

There were also the two defaults through inflation in 1920 and 1923.

Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today.

A debt buyback is something of a Catch 22 to succeed in inducing a haircut, it needs to profit from the default fears that it intends to alleviate.

(v) systematically link debt repayment and debt servicing by commodity dependent developing countries to adverse movements in prices of commodity exports and imports

A wave of state defaults followed in the late 1830 s.

With lower nominal income and the same level of debt, the threat of default necessarily increases.

Instead of defaulting, countries arranged rescue packages with the IMF.

Despite a messy default, this fresh start has generated a remarkable turnaround.

Furthermore, why do small banks, which have no implicit backing from the government, also have so much leverage?

Or it could be a soft default in which Greece unilaterally services its existing debt with new debt rather than paying in cash.

The European Commission s claim that this slowdown reflects high sovereign default risk, rather than fiscal consolidation, is belied by the UK, where the sovereign risk is deemed by markets to be virtually nonexistent.

The second lesson, and the one most pertinent to Europe now, concerns the crucial role played by the default scenario.

This strategy s success presupposes that, in the interim, economic growth will strengthen the capacity to repay debt down the line.

Without growth, tax revenues will remain stagnant, and the capacity to service debts will continue to erode.

That means paying down debt and rebuilding savings, leaving consumer demand mired in protracted weakness.

Most of the big Latin American debtors took extraordinary pains to avoid an explicit default.

As a result, households want to spend less and pay down their debts.

With US government debt repayment now in play, the very concept of dollar based riskless assets is in doubt.

(It hardly needs stating that borrowing money from the IMF is not a default.)

These steps, it is argued, have taken both sovereign default risk and a banking crisis off the table.

The same crisis looks like a solvency crisis for those who are geographically distant.

However, it should be noted that the United Nations has been late in paying for the services rendered by local enterprises and institutions and has even denied some of the debt.