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 [...]

Gordon Brown has in this context, declared for the British parliament that he works “with the IMF” for the best possible to estimate what they are entitled to demand of Iceland. IMF on its side not only exposes the process by providing loans to the outline of Iceland, but set conditions that can be characterized [...]

Amidst the economic disaster, little has been talked about the disappearance of Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, president of Iceland from 1996. Olafur was a controversial politician to say the least, a leftist who had no control over the finances of his ministries in the eighties but surprisingly won the election of 1996, not least because of [...]

The best job in Iceland appears to be in the solvency committee’s of the banks. There are three of those operating, one for Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbankinn each. Apart from the couple of millions of ISK they are taking home in their paycheck every month, the story from a source in London where they have [...]

Amid the cesspool of Gunnar Birgisson’s scandals in Kopavogur, the IceSave debacle, the increasing squeeze on homeowners, this is my Sunday sermon for now. This ramble should be read out loud with a young, poor and angry voice. A long time ago I had a girlfriend who was born in Teheran but she moved to [...]

I heard a good story this weekend. It was about my personal finances. The story told of how I’d been gambling around with money in the good times and lost it all in the economic collapse. Therefore I am supposed to be bitter and therefore I am supposed to be keeping this site going, going [...]