Political scientist Jack Snyder claims that individuals and groups can gain significant power if they can convince others of their ideas, as those become the norms and ideas which shape our reality.  Iceland’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson’s official visit to the Vatican in March 2011 raised some interesting questions about agents of powerful positions, be [...]

I’ve been reading Frozen Assets, former Kaupthing Singer&Friedlander  boss Armann Thorvaldsson’s account of his Kaupthing days. Armann is a charismatic character who I recall claiming that his ambition when moving to London to build Kaupthing’s business there was to get himself onto the pages of the Financial Times and Hello. His New Years Eve parties [...]

Parents are supposed to have all the answers. That is why their offspring keep asking them “why” if they don’t feel satisfied with what they’ve been told. My father has always spoken wistfully of Vilmundur Gylfason, the charismatic young politician who ruffled a thousand feathers in the seventies and early eighties with eloquent criticism of [...]

Why does Iceland need the EU? A comment from this post expressed wonder at the current situation in Iceland. Somehow many people expected things to be much worse for the general population by now. People are still going to coffee shops even if the latte is approaching the price of a pre-crash beer, there are [...]

Well this is what happened…. …apart from the UK and Holland not showing any signs of rushing into negotiating… ….nothing.

Tomorrow is the first national referendum Icelandic citizens have been allowed to participate in by the political elite since the conception of the republic in 1944. By all measures, this should be a happy day for democracy in Iceland. But instead it is not a cause for celebration but a large milestone in the farcical [...]

The President who hasn’t dared face the Icelandic press to explain himself, nevertheless found time for Jeremy Paxman at the BBC last night.

The idea of an IceSave memorial is a great one. So here is a homage to the people who got us IceSave.               As Prime Minister and Finance Minister, David Oddson and Geir Haarde privatized Landbankinn into the hands of Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, who had no experience in banking but [...]

The political farce continues. The president of Iceland has just put his own personal gain above the interest of his nation. He has asked for a national referendum on the IceSave bill. What is the nation going to vote on? To pay or not to pay? If I were asked if I preferred to pay [...]

He has to approve the IceSave bill. It is easy to justify it. Vigdis Finnbogadottir made a tough decision seventeen years ago when she went against her own conviction and her own political interest and approved the EES agreement. She justified it by saying that she had made the decision for future generations, not herself. [...]