I'm not saying that the U.S. defaulting on it's debt would resemble post-World War I Germany.
I'm just saying that I've started refreshing myself on that era of history.
It's the closest modern-day parallel I could think of.
Oh, and we're buying a deep freezer and some rain barrels this week, just in case the zombie hordes do happen to show up.
Even with all of Germany's economic shortcomings, it could have still been possible to make reparation payments if foreign countries had not placed protective tariffs on Germany's goods. With the income Germany could have gained by selling goods in foreign countries, for relatively low prices, reparation payments could have become feasible. The protective tariffs made this idea impossible and further depressed the German economy. Faced with reparation payments they could not afford, Germany began printing exaggerated amounts of money. This threw Germany into a state of super inflation. Inflation reached the point where millions of marks were worthless. Cartoons of the time depicted people with wheelbarrows full of money who could not buy a loaf of bread. "With the approach of world crisis foreign lenders withdrew capital and markets further closed against German imports" (Sweezy 8). The United States was an extremely significant example of this. When the U.S. was hit by the great depression they immediately sought to get the loans, which they had made to German, paid back. This, in addition to all of Germany's other problems, practically caused the German economy to collapse.
I'm sure economic experts will point out a thousand ways in which a post-Default United States would be completely different from post-Versailles Germany, and I welcome all of those explanations.
I'm just hoping that by "different" they mean "not nearly as bad as" instead of "far, far worse".