TW: As you may have read, Iceland is more or less screwed. Naturally the question becomes why? The answers are not complex. This country of roughly 300,000 had no freaking idea what they were doing economically and then shockingly it all blew apart. The sobering thought is many of their policies sound familiar to another country with roughly 300 million folks- minimal regulation, nearly blind faith in free markets, debt out the wazoo (their ratios to be fair are far worse than ours) etc. But since their country is not too big to fail unlike say ours, they have been largely left to hang.
From Fortune:
"...Iceland had one of the richest economies in Europe, but it had a problem. Its three main private sector banks had become so large that their assets amounted to more than ten times the gross domestic product of the country...Today the economy is in unbelievably horrible shape: The three banks - Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir - are in receivership. The stock market has lost 90% of its value. The central bank is technically insolvent, its modest pile of assets dwarfed by a mountain of liabilities...The currency, the krona, has lost more than half its value. GDP is expected to drop by a stomach-churning 10% in 2009, and unemployment will probably hit a 40-year high...Above all, the nation's future is heavily mortgaged. Claims from Britain alone amount to half of what's left of its GDP. 'It's like a neutron bomb that has wiped out all monetary assets but left the people intact'...
Iceland used to be one of Europe's poorest countries, a bleak place that survived mostly on fishing revenue and the occasional adventurous tourist who came to bathe in the natural hot springs or explore the moonlike lava fields. Davíd Oddsson almost single-handedly changed that. A onetime actor and producer of radio comedy shows, Oddsson, 60, was elected mayor of Reykjavík while in his early 30s and went on to become Iceland's longest-serving Prime Minister, in office from 1991 to 2004. With thick, wavy hair, he's moody, witty, and an outspoken free-marketer who likes to quote Milton Friedman and has modeled himself on Britain's Margaret Thatcher...Oddsson then put in place a comprehensive economic-transformation program that included tax cuts, large-scale privatization, and a big leap into international finance. He deregulated the state-dominated banking sector in the mid-1990s, and in 2001 he changed currency policy to allow the krona to float freely rather than have it fixed against a basket of currencies including the dollar. In 2002 he privatized the banks..."
http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/01/magazines/fortune/iceland_gumbel.fortune/index.htm
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