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Iceland Imprisoned Its Bankers And Let Banks Go Bust: What Happened Next In 3 Charts
This year, Iceland will become the first European country that hit crisis in 2008 to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output. In spite of its total 180-degree treatment of nefarious bankers, the banking system, and the people of its nation when compared to America (or The UK), Iceland has proved that there is a different (better) option that western dogma would suggest. As abhorrent as this prospect is to the mainstream's talking heads and Keynesian Klowns who bloviate wildly on macro-economics and endless counterfactuals, Iceland came to that fork in the road, and took it...
While the UK government nationalised Lloyds and RBS with tax-payers’ money and the US government bought stakes in its key banks, Iceland adopted a different approach. It said it would shore up domestic bank accounts. Everyone else was left to fight over the remaining cash.
It also imposed capital controls restricting what ordinary people could do with their money– a measure some saw as a violation of free market economics.
The plan worked. Iceland took a huge financial hit, just like every other country caught in the crisis.
This year the International Monetary Fund declared that Iceland had achieved economic recovery 'without compromising its welfare model' of universal healthcare and education.
Other measures of progress like the country’s unemployment rate, compare just as well with countries like the US.
Rather than maintaining the value of the krona artificially, Iceland chose to accept inflation.
This pushed prices higher at home but helped exports abroad – in contrast to many countries in the EU, which are now fighting deflation, or prices that keep decreasing year on year.
With the reduction of capital controls – tempered by the 39 per cent tax – it continues to make progress.
"Today is a milestone, a very happy milestone," Iceland’s finance minister Bjarni Benediktsson told the Guardian when he announced the tax.
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But apart from the economics... Iceland also allowed bankers to be prosecuted as criminals – in contrast to the US and Europe, where banks were fined, but chief executives escaped punishment. The chief executive, chairman, Luxembourg ceo and second largest shareholder of Kaupthing, an Icelandic bank that collapsed, were sentenced in February to between four and five years in prison for market manipulation.
"Why should we have a part of our society that is not being policed or without responsibility?" said special prosecutor Olafur Hauksson at the time. "It is dangerous that someone is too big to investigate - it gives a sense there is a safe haven."
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Remember, the people of Iceland had to rise up for this to happen.
Good that we already have systems which do not require parasitic bankers and payment processors.
Great. Now , all we have to do is to tow problem countries far away, in the middle of a treacherous and cold sea, with no land contact with any other country. Then, capital controls, etc...
Open your eyes, in my region of Italy, there are tunnels in the mountains built by salt smugglers in the middle ages.
Looks like it's time to set up an Amerikan military compound on Iceland,bring in about 50,000 Amerikan knee-grows,and breed these sum-bitches out of existence,before they do any more damage to the Amerikan way of life..
Of course as the rest of the western world is lead by brain dead politicians, this template which is just common sense will not be followed!
I blame the politicians. They created the Federal Reserve and the requirement that we use their fiat money, which they create at will. They have the guns. When you have a corrupt govt deciding who is successful and who is not you will have corrupt "businessmen," too.
Twenty nine percent of the dollars spent by the Federal govt is just money being created by the Federal Reserve. The banking system is the second most heavily regulated industry in the country, behind only electrical utilities.
The Fed sets the most important price of all: interest rates. Between govt regulation and the Federal Reserve I would say that the govt practically runs the banking system.
Vikings know how to deal with guest workers and the people that let them in.
Imagine what the headlines for Iceland would have been today if they had a guy like B.B. running their own version of the FED?
There is a slight difference with Iceland which IMO allowed them to burn the bankers - They have infinite energy in the form of geothermal - which can't be stolen and shipped away like oil can.