In
finance,
default is failure to meet the
legal obligations (or conditions) of a
loan, for example when a home buyer fails to make a
mortgage payment, or when a corporation or government fails to pay a
bond which has reached
maturity. A national or
sovereign default is the failure or refusal of a government to repay its national debt. The biggest private default in history is
Lehman Brothers with over $600 billion when it filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and the biggest sovereign default is Greece with $138 billion, in March 2012.