You'd be surprised. Russia, which was still a pretty decent sized world power, defaulted on its debt in the 90s. I'm not an expert on what occurred, but I beli

You'd be surprised. Russia, which was still a pretty decent sized world power, defaulted on its debt in the 90s. I'm not an expert on what occurred, but I believe the Russian government thought process was something along the lines of: -We could either sell off all the country's assets OR -Default on debt now, have a bad reputation with future foreign investors, but not shrink our country further. They went with option B. Not saying this would or will happen to the USA, but theoretically it could.