Ok sorry, I was wrong about Sweden - I thought the nation defaulted in the 90ies, but it was in fact 'only' a big chunk of their financial industry[1]. It seems that they came very close though, and the way they resolved it doesn't appear to be by tight economic grip either - the state poured 4% of their GDP into the system. However - and that's an important point that apparently went forgotten in the last US crisis - they also took the chance to regulate the financial industry more tightly, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/opinion/28iht-edbildt.1.16...

Could you expand on why do you think it was a disaster? Argentina was pretty screwed up, I'm not sure it got any worse than it already was.

This article describes things well, especially the last paragraph:

http://www.economist.com/node/21533453

Hm, while the economist's article points out how messy the process became, it doesn't makes an evaluation of how the default actually affected the argentinian economy.

I think that Greece and Argentina will make a good examples for comparisons of different approaches, when both recover economically (if they do recover, that is).

> Sweden (1812)

I would wager the guess that the world economy in 2013 is slightly incomparable to that in 1812.

I agree.