A year after the crash, reporter Eric Campbell investigates the tragi-comic saga that saw this nation of 310,000 try to become the new Wall Street. He uncovers not just over-confidence and incompetence but widespread corruption. ‘Some of the ministers from the government had very close ties with these banks and this was never really revealed [...]

Like the United States, the banking industries of Britain, Ireland and Iceland brought up the rear, as their financial centres all suffered in the crisis. Iceland’s banks were ranked the fourth most unsound, rivalled only by Zimbabwe, Mongolia and Ukraine, while Britain was the ninth from last and Ireland the 13th worst. Like the United [...]

Now that the IceSave agreement is throught Althingi and Olafur Ragnar Grimsson has signed, sealed and delivered it onwards, the focus is increasingly pointing towards the so-called “fortress” that the government promised to build around Icelandic households during the parliamentary campaign last spring. It is now almost one year since the economic disaster with the [...]

“If you think we have problems, wait until you see this place”. Australian 60 Minutes on the Iceland Crisis

In the build-up to the global crisis of 2008, tiny Iceland was a canary in the mine, a leading indicator of wider vulnerabilities. Now, amid growing optimism about global recovery, Iceland may again be a leading indicator of trouble ahead. In the space of a few days last October Iceland’s whole banking system collapsed and [...]

If it was a surprise to see Iceland pluckily elbowing its way into the vanguard of the international banking boom, it certainly wasn’t to discover that almost every Icelander had a hefty personal stake in their country’s dizzy financial adventure. They crested that high-interest wave together, and when it broke, they were all dashed on [...]

Over the top, glamorous, vain, inconsiderate, rude, brash, selfish, attention-seeking, crass, obscene, out of her mind. Silvia Night, Iceland’s 2006 Eurovision entry was the inside joke that captured the local zeitgeist perfectly, where the icon of Iceland 2006 managed to be disliked by everyone else in Europe. Seldom has art imitated life so brilliantly.

Sir Fred Goodwin is hardly beloved of the British public. But imagine just for a second how we would feel if the former RBS boss had been dishing out loans of £1bn plus to himself, his mates and their companies. People might want to chop off more than his pension. Now picture a fictional scenario [...]

Rowena Mason at the Telegraph is one of few foreign journalists at a major paper that have realized the scale and implications of the Icelandic economic meltdown; But Dr Jon Danielsson, an Icelander who teaches economics at the London School of Economics, believes that while the timing of the crash was dictated by the global [...]

August 11, 2009 Reykjavik, Iceland To the attention of Mr. Franek Rozwadowski, IMF Resident Representative to Iceland Mr. Rozwadowski I write to you on behalf of a small group of friends who have bought their first home in the last five years. Through an accident of birth, it so happened that all of us were [...]