Anyone here in Iceland?

[Liquid Blue]

In case you've missed the news, Iceland is in major shit.

Iceland's recovery from the financial crisis will take years, Prime Minister Geir Haarde said Wednesday, as the country's economy threatened to collapse.

Haarde, who earlier this week warned of a possible national bankruptcy as the country's financial sector teetered on the verge of complete failure, told reporters it would take "years, but probably not very many" before the economy was back to strength.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081008...d_081008192936

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Banks in Iceland had propelled years of significant growth, lending so freely that their assets ballooned to many times the size of the country's economy. But now the boom has turned to a bust.

In an effort to avoid financial collapse, the government took control Tuesday of Landsbanki, the second-largest bank in Iceland - its second takeover in two weeks. And, in a measure more characteristic of troubled developing economies than one of the wealthiest in the world, Iceland's central bank pegged the currency to a basket of others.

Most surprising, the government announced that it had asked Russia for a loan of €4 billion, or about $5.5 billion, to try to keep the economy afloat.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/...celandbank.php

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From SA-

Iceland is in the throes of a massive currency crisis as the krona has fallen 20% against the dollar just this week.

Since there aren't a lot of replies in this thread these days I'll just add an update on the Icelandic situation. Shit is really going downhill right now.

The CEO of one of the three big gasoline companies has said that there is a significant risk of Iceland running out of oil. The companies need dollars to buy it, but no one is selling dollars for ISK right now. They have around 30 days of oil in stock, but unless something big happens there isn't any more coming in, they say.

CEO's of the biggest grocery chains have also said something similar; that imported goods will be running out in the next few days and thus people should be stocking up on them right now. Imagine if the head of Wal-Mart said "Yeah, we might be running out of food soon so people should stock up".

Oh, and inflation just passed 14%. The króna keeps on tumbling down and it just started snowing last night.

I heard people were freaking out and running to stock up on food and gas on Tuesday. The government froze the major banks, so when people also tried to withdraw money, they were denied. Crazy shit.

Anyone from Iceland that can give us a inside look at how things are going over there?

[H.M.S. Stargazer]

Does this mean my Canadian $$$'s Will buy me hot viking women and hotsprings? Sign me up!

[Jeenyuss]

sarger's from iceland, hope he's alright.

[megaman89]

sarger's from iceland, hope he's alright.

hope he loses his internet connection

[Da1andonly]

don't think anyone from iceland plays...

but yeah, weird shit going on lately, everywhere.

[Doc Flabby]

ICELAND HAS STOLEN MY MONIES :fear:

[Galleleo]

Roughly 120.000 Dutch people had a bank account with Icelandic internet bank Icesave and have very likely lost all their money, at the very least it is really unclear what the deal exactly is, but they cant touch their money right now.

[Dabram]

perhaps iceland should've just gone for the euro and dumped their silly currency..

in your face iceland!!!

[H I M]

perhaps iceland should've just gone for the euro and dumped their silly currency..

in your face iceland!!!

In before GBP goes tits-up.

[Doc Flabby]

In before GBP goes tits-up.

Just to put in perspective.

GBP is pretty safe. The £500bn we are giving our banks takes our national debt to only 1/4 of our GDP. Whilst this is alot of money, its not beyond our means to repay it (or indeed print it without staggering inflation). Basically everyone in the UK now has a £18,000 loan of which we are hopeing to get most of it back. Regardless of what our politicians are telling us tax WILL go up and public services will have to be cut. We have owed more money in the past. There was a time we had to get a loan off the IMF because no one would lend us any money :P That said alot of what is happening now smells of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

Wheras Iceland has the GDP which is the equivalent to Marks and Spensers Turnover, basically M&S makes as much as the whole of Iceland. And it owes like 10x its GDP. Hell they won't even pay back the UK savers covered by there compensation scheme because they don't have any money.

China or some other country could just buy Iceland if it wanted i imagine. Maybe that would be a solution.

If the GBP was in real trouble you have seen it drastically lose value (50%) like the iceland krona after the announcement. In reality it lost about 3 cents (2%) off the euro and doller.

[Nycle]

It's only a matter of time before they ditch their currency for a more stable one (with the Euro being the most likely option, though they'd have to join the EU first). For a micro-economy like Iceland, it's extremely difficult and impractical to maintain an own currency and trying to keep it stable while being mostly integrated into a larger single market.

[Jerome Scuggs]

Anyone here in Iceland?

the crazy dude came back to work! he had a cd player and sang. all day. he actually has a great voice... so crazy, though.

UK uses anti-terrorism law to seize Icelandic bank assets

This is not your father's stock market crash

Did "under-regulation" cause the crisis? (views of a former banker)

edit: DuckTales!

[StarKitty]

I've gotta say wow.. That's an extreme kind of thing for us to do.

I can see why they did it though.. What with the situation over there.

[Jerome Scuggs]

So, Congress has finally come to the conclusion that I have taken for granted this entire time:

Either America can have a Welfare State, or a sustainable economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/bu...er&oref=slogin

Consumers, however, have cut back sharply on their spending, in what will be the first quarterly decline in 17 years when the government tally is in for the third quarter.

Business, in response, is shrinking its outlays for equipment, supplies and personnel. And now dozens of state and city governments, their tax revenue falling short of expectations, are engaged in yet another round of cost-cutting.

Apparently, we need all this excessive spending to fund the coffers of the government...

To offset this shrinkage, and head off a severe recession, the Democratic leadership in Congress is “seriously considering” a large fiscal stimulus proposal, which would send a significant amount of money to states and cities.

“We have to prop up consumption,” Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview in which he revealed some of the details the party leadership is discussing.

Garet Garrett wrote an essay called "The Revolution Was" in 1938 - in which he outlines how the New Deal was a quiet revolution, in which the government assumed massive, massive amounts of power under the guide of "recovery" - by claiming "capitalism was finished", and (to quote FDR himself), that the Constitution was a relic of "horse-and-buggy" days. Any of this sound familiar?

He discussed nine major steps that the government took to seize economic power. In the span of the last few weeks, most of them have happened again - inflation, money injections, using the Federal Reserve to loan capital directly to people (instead of banks), using taxpayer money to fund (and "take ownership of") private banks - not to mention propping up Wall Street as the bad guy.

By taxing payrolls under the social security law of compulsory thrift and taking the money to Washington instead of letting the people save it for themselves; by taxing profits and capital gains in a system that is, or was, a profit and loss system; by having its own powerful financial agencies with enormous revolving funds, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation being incomparably the great banking institution in the world; by its power to command the country's private bank resources as a preferred borrower, and by its absolute ownership of more than twenty billions of gold, which may be one-half of all the monetary gold in the world, the Federal government's power of capital formation became greater than that of Wall Street, greater than that of industry, greater than that of all American private finance. This was an entirely new power. As the government acquired it, so passed to the government the ultimate power of initiative. It passed from private capitalism to capitalistic government. The government became the great capitalist and enterpriser. Unconsciously business concedes the fact when it talks of a mixed economy, even accepts it as inevitable. A mixed economy is one in which private enterprise does what it can and government does the rest.

While this great power of capital formation was passing to the government the New Deal's economic doctors put forth two ideas, and the propagandists implanted them in the popular imagination. One was the idea that what we were facing for the first time in our history was a static economy. The grand adventure was finished. They made believe to prove this with charts and statistics. It might be true. No one could prove that it wasn't, because all future belongs to faith. The effect of this, of course, was to discourage the spirit of private enterprise.

The other idea was that people were saving too much; their reservoir was full and running over, and they t ere making no use of their own capital because the spirit of enterprise had weakened in them. There was actually a propaganda against thrift, the moral being that if the people would not employ their own capital the government was obliged to borrow it and spend it For them.

[Lucon]

Whoops, I'm an idiot