Eoin Treacy's view Thanks to colleague Michele Affortunati for sending through the link to this blog which among a number of interesting graphics contains these of sovereign debt defaults from 1820 - 1920, 1921 - 1980 and 1981 - 2003 quoting data from an IMF report by Eduardo Borensztein and Ugo Panizza titled The Costs of Sovereign Default. The clearest trends from these charts suggest that sovereign defaults are not rare events and seldom occur in isolation.