Iceland

[Chris_Жанна 11]

Does anyone immigrate there to the US??? I'm sure they do but I think since I've been on VJ I haven't seen one person from Iceland. Perhaps Iceland is the promise land and no one wants to leave? besides the 6 months of dark, and high rate of suicide, the country sitting on active volcanoes and the cold. Iceland seems like the perfect place. Think about it.... Has Iceland ever started a war? Has anyone (besides vikings) tried to take over Iceland? No one messes with Iceland!!!

Actually, now that I think about it I don't think (even living in NYC most of my life) I've never met anyone from Iceland or of Icelandic dissent. I know Bjork is from there but I have never met her so who's to say.

I'm starting to think there is no such thing as Iceland and that it is all just made up to see how many ppl will believe there is an imaginary country.

I know this might offend Icelandic ppl, and if I did I'm sorry. But if you could just write a post to this thread it will make me more apt to believe in this so called "Iceland".

Yes, I am bored. Humor me.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

My sister is married to an Icelandic man. They did the process before VJ was around. I've been over there a couple times myself.

[scandal 951]

No one messes with Iceland!!!

No one? Except maybe their own banking elite, who brought them crashing down with a worthless currency and a debt of $403,000 PER PERSON. Yes. Not a type. $403K per person.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=new...id=aBMmV1ptIQjE

Icelandic Oligarchs Frolicked as Island Sank Under Debt: Books

Review by James Pressley

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- As Iceland’s bubble billowed like a Viking sail in 2007, Robert Aliber drove around the dollhouse capital, Reykjavik, and counted cranes. His conclusion:

“You’ve got a year before the crisis hits,” the University of Chicago economist told Icelanders. The frenzied construction implied that speculation and unsustainable borrowing were rife.

The warning -- like others from economists including Joseph Stiglitz -- was ignored, writes Roger Boyes in “Meltdown Iceland,” an energetic exploration of lessons to be drawn from this all-but failed state.

And so it was that the land of lunar landscapes, volcanoes and boiled sheep heads skidded toward bankruptcy a year ago this month, after Kaupthing Bank hf, Landsbanki Islands hf and Glitnir Bank hf collapsed.

Iceland is a tiny piece in the global jigsaw, a nation of some 320,000 hugging the Arctic Circle. Yet its slight size -- “the entire financial and political decision-making class could fit into a bus” -- brings the crisis “down to scale,” Boyes says.

“The calamity that hit Iceland was,” he says, “a microcosm of what was happening elsewhere in supposedly more complex societies.”

Boyes’s thesis makes his book entertaining and frustrating by turns, as he seeks to show how an effort to bring a Thatcherite revolution to Iceland devolved into a struggle among rival clans, each bent on controlling its own bank, settling old scores and conquering distant lands.

West Ham United

Some of the swashbuckling oligarchs invaded Britain, snapping up stakes in retailers ranging from Big Food Group Plc to House of Fraser Plc. One bought a house in London’s affluent Holland Park; another purchased soccer team West Ham United.

The New Vikings, as Boyes calls them, had executive jets, helicopters and yachts. The dark glitter of their share dealing and boundless ambition make for good copy, and Boyes tells the tale in muscular prose, anecdotes and crisp images: We see Oligarchs fishing for salmon in “river water as clear as gin.”

The hitch is that the story reads like a uniquely Icelandic saga set to Bjork songs. Iceland, it turns out, didn’t always mirror the forces that triggered the Second Great Contraction.

The broad parallels are clear. In Iceland as elsewhere, disaster flowed from a toxic cocktail of financial liberalization, ballooning debt, bank wizardry and excessive risk-taking, all greased by contributions to political parties.

Russian Edge

Yet Iceland’s crisis was also rooted in a flawed wave of privatizations that had more in common with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia than with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

As Boyes tells it, Icelandic Prime Minister David Oddsson, an admirer of Thatcher and Milton Friedman, set out in the 1990s to use share sales to empower individuals. The sales instead enriched the few and allowed banks previously owned by the state to become cash machines for oligarchs bent on overseas acquisitions. Worse still, those banks were privatized without the creation of much regulatory apparatus -- or even insider- trading rules -- to go with them, Boyes says.

The Icelandic banks didn’t get sucked into the collateralization game and U.S. subprime market, Boyes says. Their preferred alchemy was the “carry trade”: Borrow money low -- in Japan, say, where the central bank had been holding rates near zero percent since 2001 -- and lend high in Iceland, where rates were high to control inflation.

Money poured in from abroad, and Icelandic bankers were happy to introduce fellow islanders to the concept. Why not buy the house or car of your dreams with a loan denominated in Japanese yen and Swiss francs?

Easy Money

Icelanders binged on easy money, taking holidays in Thailand and acquiring Range Rovers. By early 2006, Boyes writes, the combination of credit growth, current-account deficits and escalating external debt spurred Fitch Ratings to cut its outlook on Iceland’s foreign and local currency debt to negative from stable. A bigger blow came when the Bank of Japan signaled that it would raise rates. Investors sold positions in Iceland, canceling their bets, Boyes writes.

“All the ingredients were in place for a major meltdown long before the global liquidity crisis,” he says.

The Icelandic oligarchs managed to delay the day of reckoning by introducing online banking services to draw cash from Britain and elsewhere. Eager depositors included the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well as the Metropolitan Police, Boyes says. The party was almost over.

“By the time the blister popped in 2008, bank assets amounted to almost 10 times GDP,” Boyes writes.

The bust left Icelanders with a load of public and private debt that amounts to more than $403,000 per capita, or some $1.6 million for each family of four, Boyes says. As for those Range Rovers, Icelanders have given them a new name: Game-Overs.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Iceland is like Australia, except colder.

[FinnLove 0]

I hear it's beautiful! I'll be going there sometime next year on the way to Finland. You can go there for $500 per person from Seattle, including flight and two nights hotel! Now that would be a fun weekend trip...

[Niels Bohr 72]

I remembered that guy who went to Iceland (not the green land) on the Discovery Channel. He went to the Northern part where the land is covered through miles of dense snow and ice. He slept in an ice cave. That guy is amazing.

[almaty 19]

the chopf##k is no Les..he probably ahd a heater...bear is a fake

[SMR 368]

Well, I don't know if anybody has actually tried to take over Iceland yet, but it was an important airbase in WWII. Considering it's arctic position makes it a good base to launch an airstrike against any city in Europe, North America, or Russia, I would say that if there is another world war, it would figure prominently again.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I wouldn't mind visiting - I hear you can see the Northern lights there.

[trinket 30]

Iceland total population is only 300k. Don't you see they are rare and precious, you will have to dig the whole world to meet them