Sovereign Insolvency - An Essay on State Bankruptcy

Now we are seeing an unprecedented piling up of sovereign debt and issuing of electronic money by central banks. To be exact, the scale of public debt is not entirely unprecedented. Individual states have been more heavily indebted, and their central banks have financed the deficits even more liberally than what is going on now on a global scale. However, we have never before seen a pandemic of growing public debt funded by central banks. In the case of an individual state establishing its fiscal policy on the central bank’s note printing the historical outcome has been pretty straightforward: economic unrest and instability, often state bankruptcy.

Will history repeat itself on a global scale? What are the ethical implications of state bankruptcy?