It is a strange feeling to witness your country falling apart before your eyes. You first start to panic when you realise that there is nothing you can do to stop the crash. When the crisis hit Iceland’s shores last year the rock of the Viking economy proved to be nothing more than clear water. [...]

What would hurt Dubai’s reputation would be unequal treatment between domestic (or UAE, GCC, Middle-Eastern or Islamic) creditors and other creditors from the West or from the non-Islamic East.  If Islamic debt were to be interpreted by the Dubai authorities as debt instruments that give preferential treatment – non-contractual seniority – to Islamic creditors, Dubai’s [...]

Lets see what happens before predicting the apocalypse again but here is the story off the Guardian. “The crisis in Dubai has brought up speculation about how many more skeletons might be left in the cupboard,” said Richard McGuire, a strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in London. Graham Turner, of consultancy GFC Economics, said: [...]

The creditors’ list of Landsbankinn, courtesy of DV. Landsbanki_Krofulisti_V101.PDF

The love hate relationship between the Independence Party and Jon Asgeir Johannesson’s Baugur gets stranger every day. The right wing politicians of the Independence Party loves to blame everything that is wrong with Iceland on Jon Asgeir and Baugur. If you believe what they say in the media then you’d deduct that they actually hate [...]

The lady who called me the other day to offer me an American Express credit card was surprised when I told her that I didn’t think the card was good enough compared to the one I already have. She thought I was out of my mind. But she had formed a very positive view towards [...]

Joly knows the stakes are high. “This is so much larger than Elf,” she says later with relish, “but we don’t know just how much larger. Not yet.” From the Financial Times

The case of Glitnir lending money to children aged 1-17 for shares in BYR Savings & Loans is so filthy it is hard to grasp. The bank, with current CEO Birna Einarsdottir as a top manager allowed the parents of ten children to borrow up to 24 million ISK in their name. Amid public outcry [...]

Artist and cartoonist Halldor Baldursson’s take on the fall of Ronald McDonald in Iceland, published in Morgunbladid. Reference of Saddam Hussein is not coincidental.

The Financial Times put McD’s Iceland departure on its front page today, and the central role of McDonald’s as the prime example/metaphor for the costs and benefits of a global economy The pros: as per Thomas Friedman: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its [...]