Bulow and Rogoff (1989) showed that lending to small countries cannot be supported merely on the country's "reputation for repayment" if exclusion from future credit mar-kets is the only consequence of default. Their arguments are valid under fairly general conditions but they do not go through when the output of the sovereign may vanish along a path of successive low productivity shocks, or when it may grow unboundedly along a path of successive high productivity shocks. We propose an alternative proof illustrating that their renowned sovereign debt paradox holds in full generality.