Greece alone has defaulted several times in its national history.
More broadly, the history of government borrowing through the centuries is littered with cases of default. "We have been here before," economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff write in a book with the title, meant to be a bit humorous, "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly."
However, a large wave of defaults now is not a certainty. The magnitude of losses to creditors in the eurozone will depend greatly on circumstances – how the global economy performs and how policymakers handle the fiscal challenge.
Although the US has a stellar track record for paying its debts, even founding Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was no stranger to the theory of default. In 1790 he described creditors as generally "enlightened men" who will agree to a debt restructuring when any "real necessity may demand.”
