Whatever happened to the boring old Nordic state of Iceland? Protesters and police are now clashing outside the Central Bank. DV reports that celebrated singer Ellen Kristjansdottir is in the emergency room at the National Hospital after the police pushed her away. Another protester Gretar Eiriksson also clashed with police as these photos from DV [...]

Fridrik Jonsson shows two pictures on his blog today that challenge the wisdom of applying economic theories to large economies and small as if there were no difference. The first one shows inflation from January 2001 – October 2009. The second one shows the development of CB interest rates in the same period. Notice a [...]

Asgeir Jonsson, former head of Kaupthing’s Analytical Departments has written a book called Why Iceland? on the economic disaster. Why, what, how are words that often came to mind when I thought about Asgeir and his department at Kaupthing. One of the absurdities of the economic boom was all the head analyzers of the bank’s [...]

One out of every six househoulds must use more than half its income to pay off its loans. Seven percent should use 90% of its income to service their debt or roughly 5,000 homes. In addition twelwe thousand households are being heavily squeezed. This was revealed at the Central Bank’s conference on the debt of [...]

“Foreign journalists (not Icelandic ones, except for maybe Egill Helgason), Icelandic and foreign specialists, foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown had said from 2006: “this isn’t going to work, you have to do something”. Althingi didn’t do anything, the government didn’t do anything, the Central Bank didn’t do anything, the Financial Authorities didn’t do anything and [...]

The Central Bank has decided to only lower its interest rates by 1% down to 12%. The business sector and households are expressing deep disappointment with this decision as the slow and painful death by interest rates continues. Arnor Sighvatsson, Chief Economist of the Central bank says that the circumstances had not allowed for a [...]

“I am famous in Iceland’s community of 300,000, and two or three months ago I used to have two or three guards with me,” he says, sipping coffee in his lounge. “Now, though, I go where I like. When this was first going on people would cry hostility towards me, but today I get a [...]

Today’s Central Bank of Iceland selling rate is 168.09 krónur per euro, down 12% since 1 February. On the other hand, if you look at Yahoo! Finance, they quote a rate of 290.66 krónur per euro… The European Central Bank hasn’t quoted a ISK exchange rate since 3 December, when it was 290 krónur to [...]