The cost of doing nothing for two years

It's probably not possible to economize on government budgets, why they periodically go bust (debt is cleared by sticking it to the creditors). It happens more often than people think. In the last century, the US did in 1971, the USSR was bankrupt at the end, Russia itself reneged again in 1998.

The worrying trend is that, to prevent smaller bankruptcies, the US, EU, Japan etc. are prepared to stake their collective solvency. I call that the real systemic risk. What was the terrible scenario evoked by the financial papers back in '08? Could it be any worse than the debt collapse of all the major economies?