“The catastrophic economic collapse of Iceland has in international news stories been described as simply another, inevitable casualty of the credit crunch. A Wall Street Journal story last week noted that Iceland was one of the international financial bubble’s most enthusiastic players,” but failed to mention how Iceland’s largely homemade crisis was created by a [...]

The Economist, Dec 11th 2008 Iceland’s banking collapse is the biggest, relative to the size of an economy, that any country has ever suffered. There are lessons to be learnt beyond its shores

This is the Icelandic Music and Conference hall which is being built down by the harbor in Reykjavik. It is supposed to be the home of the Icelandic Symphonic Orchestra and the World Trade Center in Reykjavik. Landsbankinn was going to move their headquarters there. One of the major investors is Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson. It is [...]

Today, Bjarni Armannsson, former CEO of Glitnir spoke up for the first time since the collapse of the banking system he played a major role in building. “I believe that those who lead the financial system are responsible. They should in a responsible way estimate how they are going to handle it. I do not [...]

The good times were 2004-2006 when the banks lent freely to homeowners and those who would be. It had only been 1-2 years since privatization and of course they were going to enter that market. Why wouldn’t a private Northen European bank with 20%+ market share (as all the Icelandic banks were at the time) [...]

In 2006, the Independent Party opened a website to promote itself in the elections for Althingi. From xd.is “The Independence Party is the most supported political party in Iceland. It was founded on the 25th of May 1929 with the merger of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. The party has around 50 thousand [...]

It has emerged that the banks lent money to shelf-companies that had only one purpose, to buy stock in the banks themselves to inflate the worth of their own stock. Those loans were granted without collateral and they were also made to invest in businesses’ owned by the largest owners of the banks. The banking [...]

It is interesting to see what was heralded by many as the “new times of the woman” play out. When the banks were privatized, Birna Einarsdottir was appointed head of Glitnir and Elin Sigfusdottir head of Landsbankinn. Many celebrated the news of two women being handed the reins, as supposedly they have different ways of [...]

Jon Asgeir Johannesson has managed to bankrupt Whittards of Chelsea, England’s best known tea-shop that has withstood the test of times for more than a century. Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson said he was going to bring West Ham amongst the greats and has succeeded in turning it into possibly the new Leeds United. Is it any wonder [...]

According to the IMF, the country has seen the worst economic crash ever, relative to the size of the economy. Next year’s negative growth in GDP is going to outdo Zimbabwe by a mile. So the economists at the Central Bank are probably hard at work trying to fix what can be fixed in the [...]