Iceland's president tells it like is

I am speaking of the US...our government forced the banks to loan to people that should have been run out of a bank with a stick. Fuck you

No shit sherlock. Your graph goes until 2008, when the crisis happened. Of course there were no recovery in 2008 because it was in the middle of the crisis,

Try harder.

Here is a good read from 2009 that is still very true.


Read the whole thing, Iceland is being played and the most important thing is how the people of Iceland perceive it.

[link to www.globalresearch.ca]


Article from april 2009; Iceland is under attack – not militarily­ but financially. It owes more than it can pay. This threatens debtors with forfeiture of what remains of their homes and other assets. The government is being told to sell off the nation’s public domain, its natural resources and public enterprises to pay the financial gambling debts run up irresponsibly by a new banking class. This class is seeking to increase its wealth and power despite the fact that its debt-leveraging strategy already has plunged the economy into bankruptcy. On top of this, creditors are seeking to enact permanent taxes and sell off public assets to pay for bailouts to themselves.


Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare. Faced with loss of their property and means of self-support, many citizens will get sick, lead lives of increasing desperation and die early if they do not repudiate most of the fraudulently offered loans of the past five years. And defending its civil society will not be as easy as it is in a war where the citizenry stands together in coping with a visible aggressor. Iceland is confronted by more powerful nations, headed by the United States and Britain. They are unleashing their propagandists and mobilizing the IMF and World Bank to demand that Iceland not defend itself by wiping out its bad debts. Yet these creditor nations so far have taken no responsibility for the current credit mess. And indeed, the United States and Britain are net debtors on balance. But when it comes to their stance vis-à-vis Iceland, they are demanding that it impoverish its citizens by paying debts in ways that these nations themselves would never follow. They know that it lacks the money to pay, but they are quite willing to take payment in the form of foreclosure on the nation’s natural resources, land and housing, and a mortgage on the next few centuries of its future.


If this sounds like the spoils of war, it is – and always has been. Debt bondage is the name of this game. And the major weapon in this conflict of interest is how people perceive it. Debtors must be convinced to pay voluntarily, to put creditor interests above of the economy’s prosperity as a whole, and even to put foreign demands above their own national interest. This is not a policy that my country, the United States, follows. But popular discussion in Iceland to date has been one-sided in defense of creditor interests, not that of its own domestic debtors.


Ultimately, Iceland’s adversary is not a nation or even a class, but impersonal financial dynamics working globally and domestically. To cope with its current debt pressure, Iceland must recognize how uniquely destructive an economic regime its bankers have created, through self-serving legislation and outright fraud. With eager foreign complicity, its banks have managed to create enough foreign debt to cause chronic currency depreciation and hence domestic price inflation for many decades to come.


To put Iceland’s financial dilemma in perspective, examine how other countries have dealt with huge debt obligations. Historically, the path of least resistance has been to “inflate their way out of debt.” The idea is to pay debts with “cheap money” in terms of its reduced purchasing power. Governments do this by printing money and running budget deficits (spending more than they take in through taxes) large enough to raise prices as this new money chases the same volume of goods. That is how Rome depreciated its currency in antiquity, and how America managed to erode much of its own debt in the 1970s – and how the dollar’s falling international value has wiped out much of the U.S. international debt in recent years. This price inflation reduces the debt burden – as long as wages and other income rise in tandem.


Faced with an unprecedented explosion of debt obligations – many of them apparently fraudulent, and certainly in violation of traditional credit practice – Iceland has turned this inflationary solution inside out. Instead of permitting the classic credit cure of inflating the currency, it has created a dream economy for creditors, preventing the classical escape from debt. Iceland has found a way to inflate its way into debt, not out of it. By indexing debt to the rate of inflation, it has guaranteed a unique windfall for banks that vastly increases what they receive in a “down market,” at the expense of wage earners and industrial profits. Linking mortgage loans to the consumer price index (CPI) in the face of a depreciating currency and heavy balance-of-payments drain to foreigners can have only one result: destruction of Iceland’s society and its traditional way of life.


Iceland needs to repudiate this debt bomb. Under present policy its debts will never lose value, because they are indexed to inflation. This in turn is being caused in large part by foreign debt service collapsing the currency, raising import prices and thus causing even larger debt payments in an endless treadmill. The economy shrinks, wages fall and assets lose value, yet debt obligations continue to grow and grow. The resulting evisceration of wages, living standards and consumer spending will further shrink the economy – a prescription for economic virus that threatens to plague Iceland for many decades if it is not reversed now. Capital formation will plunge as consumers lack money to spend. Many may not have enough to survive. The economy will be “crucified on a cross of gold,” to use William Jennings Bryan’s famous phrase in the 1896 American presidential election when he advocated an inflationary coinage of silver to alleviate debt pressure on U.S. farmers and labor.



way less then 50%

Please read the whole article this is only about 10% of it.

You know that the bankers have been arrested only in 2011 to overcome all what your article describes in 2009, right?

I read that the IMF admitted that Iceland is doing since 2011 (the jailing of the banksters and rejection of the Euro) a strong recovering.

The updated graph is the same; they are at 640, right where the little shelf was at the end of 2008. Still down over 40% from the 1998 numbers. And only worth 7% of their high value. They lost 93% of the total value of the country along with all control of their national resources.

Iceland’s government did this to its people! They borrowed 50 billion euros when their GDPis worth less than 9 billion a year! The government FORCED the 3 main banks of Iceland holds 80% of the government debt!The government collapsed its own banking system on purpose because they want foreign banks to take over.

Also if you didn’t know the government in 2007 froze outside investors bank accounts, more than half a million bank accounts were frozen over deposit insurance! The country is paying about 8% of it GDP in just insurance to the bank!

The reason Iceland is not a Greece situation is because Iceland has its own currency; Europe does not care if Iceland’s currency crashed, is will not affect the euro like a Grecian collapse would!

People please realize the ramifications of this, do you think they would do this if the billionaires were not going to make out!

When has the little guy ever been helped??

This only hurts the little people; it helps no one but those with money who stand by ready to buy everything up!
This is a corrupt government destroying the wealth of their average citizen.

What mothers and fathers have fought, worked & saved for all their life will go poof like a magic act. The government will get richer as the people suffer under the oppression of monetary discord.

People really need to learn what the velocity of money means and how it affects everyday lives.



^ ^ ^ ^ ^
This is the life savings of all of Iceland

The clueless applaud their own demise. But hey the Euro will get stronger and that’s all that matters!

Last Edited by Chrit on 11/30/2012 05:31 PM

[link to www.nytimes.com]

Iceland emerged from recession in the third quarter, official data showed Tuesday, returning to growth for the first time since its financial system collapsed at the height of the crisis in 2008.

Iceland’s real gross domestic product grew by 1.2 percent in the July-September period from the previous quarter, the first quarterly increase since the same period in 2008. Iceland entered a slump after its overleveraged financial sector collapsed in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.


I doubt that the Euro will get stronger. It will collapse eventually sooner or later. The Icelandic government made a wise choice to get out of the monetary system.

Brief is an idiot, room temperature IQ.

Realize Op I’m just warning people why the banks want this to happen in more countries.

Going to try to explain it in very simple terms.

You buy a house for $100,000 and work two jobs to pay it off early, you now own your house with no debt.

Your neighbor just moves in to his $100,000 and makes one year of payments.

Government says we threw the banks out, you own nothing on your mortgages now…well that is great for your neighbor but you just lost the last 20 years of your life working two jobs trying to make a honest living.

Your house values plummet because no one in your country can get a loan now, but you have to sell because your job transferred you.

You have to sell but your homes are now only worth what people have saved in the bank, your 100,000 house is barely worth $10,000 now but you have to sell. So not only did you lose your life savings but your neighbor and anyone who had high debt just made a killing and got a free house. But the people keeping out of trouble that paid off their debts and stayed away from the banks lost everything.

Now your home goes up for sale. No one in your country can get a loan but foreign investors can easily get loans on your property. Rich EU banker says I can buy my million dollar vacation house for 10% of what it used to be worth. Let’s by ten of them! and make a resort for foreign travelers. So the banks start buying up everything for 10% of its original value knowing it will go back up in the next ten to twenty years.

The foreign bankers even start buying up real capitol, businesses with hard commodities and exporting those commodities to prop up their own economies. IE the Euro zone.

They want Iceland’s economy to stay low so they have cheap labor and resources. The banks walk away with not only Iceland owing them huge amounts of debt but they legally buy up the entire country for near nothing at the same time.


This is why they want you to believe it is a good idea.