The government's perpetual failure to live up to debt obligations was an alternative to taxing these same elites directly, which the regime found much more difficult to do politically. It is a tradition carried on by contemporary governments in Latin America, such as that of Argentina, which after the economic crisis of 2001 forced not just foreign investors but also its own pensioners and savers to accept a massive write-down of its sovereign debt. European domains of the Habsburg Empire in the mid-sixteenth century