Iceland - The Land where the Men are Men, and the Women fedup

For over a thousand years, Icelanders - yes that group of lost Vikings who got stranded on a volcanic island on their way to America - did nothing except fish and fuck.

Pardon the language, but really that's all they did, ... and of course raping and pillaging Christians until the Christians converted them.

So they fished and they made love to their cousins.

And being a Scandanaivan sort, they Volvoized their political and economic system. The banks, hospitals, schools were all state run. Fishermen required licensed set quotas. Everyone could see the Prime Minister. Criminals were sent to counseling sessions and victims got the blame... that sort of thing.

Then one day in 2003, they checked out Wall Street. And thought, hey, maybe we CAN do that! Maybe we should try that Capitalism crap for a change.

And so they privatized stuff. Then they realized they could borrow cash from the Japanese who had lower rates - and buy more stuff - and prices rose.

At that instant they realized that finance was not about catching more fish - but buying ALL the fish in the market and selling it to people at double the original cost. The latter would then sell the "fish" to others for profit too and so on.

"That was the biggest American financial lesson the Icelanders took to heart: the importance of buying as many assets as possible with borrowed money, as asset prices only rose. By 2007, Icelanders owned roughly 50 times more foreign assets than they had in 2002."

They were buying Turkish airline companies, Singaporean soccer teams, Indian Sari Factories, Lehman Brothers, anything and everything.

Its all fine until people refuse to buy the fish at the exorbitant prices. Then the whole place started to smell awfully fishy pretty quickly.

When credit dried up, asset prices fell. And so the pass the parcel game was up, and the winner found the prize was a stinky dead old fish.

And so Iceland and all Icelanders went totally bankrupt. This is what you get when you put fishermen in charge of banks and international finance. It looks easy to do. It seems anyone can do it. But to paraphrase a British admiral - it takes 1 year to build a bank building - it takes 100 years to create an efficient banking system.

But perhaps it has something to do with the Icelandic mindset. They think they can do it - and damn you if you say they can't.

Alcoa, the biggest Aluminum smelting firm, wanted to set up a plant in Iceland to take advantage of the natural volcanic energy. However, the problem was that the Icelandic men refused to follow safety procedures.

“In manufacturing,” says the Alcoa spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix."

And they also believed in the existence of elves.

Before Alcoa could build its plant, it had to hire a government expert to study the area and make sure there were no elves living there. Hmmm... they should have called them workplace consultants like we do in Australia.

You can read the rest of the fubar story here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?printable=true&currentPage=all