Word: sovereign
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...surest bet around. Reputation aside, however, politicians abuse their ability to borrow just like any spendthrift with too many credit cards, and often pile up more bills than they can handle. Argentina, Russia, Mexico and others have stiffed their bankers over the past 30 years. In fact, the sovereign-debt crisis goes back as far as the concept of the sovereign state. The first recorded government default took place in the 4th century B.C., when Greek municipalities failed to pay back loans granted by a temple. (Read "The Party's Over for Spendthrift Greeks...
...Some of his proposals seem far to the left of his peers - like setting up a sort of sovereign wealth fund that would use the income from natural resources to fund basic services - but others are refreshingly pragmatic, like a suggestion to measure poverty not by income but by access to water, food, medicine, education and legal rights. "Poverty is the absence of these five things," he says, and indeed there are many whose rising incomes don't reflect the true state of their lives...
...country since 2007. "In some cases, the value of the drugs being trafficked is greater than the country's national income," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in an October 2008 report on the situation. "[These countries] risk becoming shell states - sovereign in name but hollowed out from the inside by criminals in collusion with corrupt officials...
...international community. Last month, President Ahmadinejad publicly rejected a reasonable proposal to have Iran export the vast majority of its uranium stockpiles to Russia, to be processed under international safeguards. Without even considering these options, the Iranian government cannot claim that the international community is somehow denying its sovereign rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
Since the start of the year, the 16 European nations that make up the euro zone have watched their currency plunge to an eight-month low as a result of sovereign-debt panic. Greece, which is perhaps the weakest link in the European Union, was first to hit the wall on news that its deficit has ballooned to nearly 13% of GDP. Then last week, worry about debt default spread from Greece to Spain, Portugal and Ireland, where spending is similarly out of control. (See the best business deals...