Two Central Banks Keep the Ledger of Sovereign Defaults

The Bank of Canada and the Bank of England jointly publish a database of sovereign debt defaults, updated annually, that provides estimates of the stocks of government obligations in default.

The units are worth noticing. The database measures a stock — obligations that are outstanding and unmet — rather than a moment in time. A default, in this accounting, isn't an event that ends when the headlines do; it's a quantity that keeps sitting on the books.