A message to the USA and Fox News. Just like you Iceland has spent the last decade under the governance of an idealistic herd of nutjobs who ran our economy into the ground. Just like you we now have enough of those nutjobs appearing on TV and in newspapers trying to blame the bad situation [...]

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.

In every Nordic country the main sector has dictated whether the public votes yes or no on the EU. In Sweden and Finland the manufacturing sectors,  in Denmark the agriculture export industry and in Norway oil, fish and agriculture. Their access to politicians is such that the public does not stand a chance once their [...]

What the company actually said was that it can no longer compete with Icelandic fast-food joints that rely on local produce – and which make delicious beef samlokas, as I discovered at a stand in downtown Reykjavik in August. McDonald’s imports its supplies from Germany. It is being undercut. Simple as that. The weak krona [...]

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they want” - Thucydides Two years ago, the residents of Hafnarfjordur rejected the enlargement of Rio Tinto Alcan’s aluminum plant in their vicinity in a popular vote. Today the plant’s supporters are back. They needed 25% of registered voters to sign a petition to [...]

Some people think it is absolutely brilliant that McDonald’s is packing up its Big Macs and leaving Iceland. They fail to see the big picture. Crap burgers and awesome milkshakes aside, an operating McDonald’s in a country is a sign of active participation in a global community. It is surely no coincidence that McDonald’s arrived in Iceland at the dawn of Iceland’s participation [...]

Julia Staples is a photographer who has done a series called Free Market: Since 2003 I have been witnessing the unregulated, unfettered growth of Iceland’s economy and now I am part of its tragic collapse which occurred in October 2008. The suburbs of Reykjavik practically doubled in size in less than a decade and currently [...]

EVER since the cod wars of the 1970s, when the British lost the right to fish within 200 miles of the Icelandic coast, Britain’s gift to global gastronomy—battered fillets of fish and chips sold by takeaway restaurants—has relied on Icelandic trawlermen. Most of the cod sold by chip shops in England and Wales (the Scots [...]

The famous words of the chairman of the congressional committee which was supposed to deliver a report on the economic collapse of Iceland on November 1. Since these words were spoken in August the nation has held its breath. People have been waiting patiently in the knowledge that the system was working on bringing answers. [...]

Across the road from the National Museum in Reykjavik stands “Outlaws”, a sculpture by an artist called Einar Jónsson, finished in 1900. A man carries his dead wife across his shoulders while cradling a young child in his arms. Beside him walks a dog possessed of a feral glare as wild as his master’s. The [...]