Sovereign Default Quotes

When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.

The financial history of the last century shows a steady increase in the amount of public indebtedness. Nobody believes that the states will eternally drag the burden of these interest payments. It is obvious that sooner or later all these debts will be liquidated in some way or other, but certainly not by payment of interest and principal according to the terms of the contract.

Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

Establish that a Government may decline a provision for its debts, though able to make it, and you overthrow all public morality, you unhinge all the principles that must preserve the limits of free constitutions.

If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

After everyone has had a chance to bluster, posture, and pontificate, we are left with one basic question: under any foreseeable circumstance, would it be in our national interest to default on our debt? The answer is unequivocally no.

There can be no such thing as a state's right to default on a national duty.

We only have a Plan A. The acceptance and full implementation of the existing plan, the so-called Plan A, is the best solution for Greece, for the euro zone and also for creditors and holders.

If a company can declare bankruptcy, why can't a country do so?

State constitutions typically provide that the state first has to service its debt, then make it pension payments, and then pay for services. What we don't know is whether that order will be enforced. And ultimately, the busted state is going to be looking to the federal government for a bailout. Think Greece, but on a much bigger scale.

Few in Europe imagined the incompetence and dishonesty of Greek economic managers would bring the entire European project into question.

What you have in legacy countries is long-term insolvency.

So it won't be a surprise when the Greek default actually happens and we expect it one way or the other to be relatively soon.

Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn't pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe.

Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!

Your friends, through economic mismanagement (see Greece), can harm you faster than your enemies. And your rivals falling (see Russia and China) can be more dangerous than your rivals rising. If Russia, an economy spanning nine time zones, goes into recession and cannot pay foreign lenders with its lower oil revenues — and all this leads to political turmoil and defaults to Western banks — that crash will be felt globally

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

I firmly believe that the U.S. has to honor its debt.

When the Reich could no longer pay its obligations, Germany would go bankrupt.

But if our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

The consequences of a collapse would not be pretty. Whichever country precipitated it - Germany by threatening to abandon the euro, or Greece or Spain by actually doing so - would trigger economic chaos and incur its neighbours' wrath.

American investors [abroad] receive an interest return higher by at least 2 percent on the average than they would receive from similar government or industrial investment within the United States …. It is obvious that they are taking a correspondingly greater risk. A considerable portion of this investment is in areas (as in parts of Latin-America) where political unrest is chronic and where legislation changes rapidly, or in areas in which there is a serious possibility of war or bankruptcy.

Defaulting on our [national] debt is defaulting on America.

What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of that country's sovereign bonds are that country's banks.