The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

[DrYB/C]

1.
The Financial War Against Iceland
Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare.
By Prof Michael Hudson
http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintAr...rticleId=13055

I haven’t had a chance to ingest the article in full, but, upon skimming it, it seems like a great read.

[Starving Steve]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

I don't have too much symmmmmmmmmmpathy for dead-beats and debtors now, especially those who would try to inflate and de-value their way out of debts, as the Icelanders have done in years before. Let them pay-up. Interest rates are very low, so let them pay-up in full.

Paying one's bills is something people have to get used to again, no matter how old fashioned and painful it is.

[don]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

1.
The Financial War Against Iceland
Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare.
By Prof Michael Hudson
http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintAr...rticleId=13055
.

And sooo much cheaper. Neo-colonialism has entered a new phase. FIRE roasted. Will stooge puppets like Karsai :p be seen as so yesterday (of course asset stripping through debt servitude in Afghanistan is a problematic enterprise ;))

[Diarmuid]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

I don't have too much symmmmmmmmmmpathy for dead-beats and debtors now, especially those who would try to inflate and de-value their way out of debts, as the Icelanders have done in years before. Let them pay-up. Interest rates are very low, so let them pay-up in full.

I will make the assumption you are in the US apologies if this is incorrect I wonder though how much sympathy you will have if the upper middle class are ever called to book for the sins of Wall Streets / Washingtons currency manipulations and debt, in Iceland the people responsible for this mess are long gone out of Krona and it is the poor f**ker on the steet is left holding the bag they have my smypathy at least.

Agreed on this point though: when the bill is your own

Paying one's bills is something people have to get used to again, no matter how old fashioned and painful it is

[Starving Steve]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

Remember the Icelanders? They de-valued their Old Krona to be worth 0.01 of a New Krona in 1981.

Funny how there is little sympathy for those who had their savings in Old Kronas at the banks in Iceland in 1981. This sympathy street, especially in the leftwing, seems to run just one-way: for the debtors and deadbeats, not the savers and pensioners.

[karim0028]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

This article is absolutely amazing! Great article. Talking about paying debts at the expense of the entire country, that is just plain madness.... I know some folks talk about paying debts as the right thing to do...

True in alot of situations and for the most part i agree. But not when your talking about taking a pound of flesh in return for your debt! In the case of Iceland an entire nation is being sent to the auction block and for debt that is ever growing and never ending....

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

Somewhere a few days ago, now I've forgotten where, I saw a longish and excellent article explaining what it looked and felt like on the ground, in Iceland.

Apparently the generations of hard living by fishing on the open seas, with a small inbred population (valued for hereditary studies) has created a people whose males are unusually strong risk takers. Those were the ones who caught the most fish. When a man walks down the street, other men will commonly and intentionally bump into them, like bull moose butting horns, because that's how it is. Not a land for wimps. The population has always been small. Everyone seems to know everyone. Anyone can just walk into the Prime Ministers office and chat.

Several years ago, the country securitized its fishing industry, handing out the equivalent of carbon credits, in their case, the rights to X percent of whatever fishing catch was allowed that year. Rights were handed out in proportion to how much fish had been caught the previous few years. This left the very best to buy up rights to bring in more fish, and the rest to sell their rights and invest the cash.

Go-go investing hit Iceland. It was like selling whiskey to the American Indians (who apparently have a hereditary weakness for alcohol.) They went from a traditional economy that dated centuries back to one of the hottest, leveraged, investing centers in the world, in just a couple or three years. Young males with high testerone levels make excellent day traders.

Yeah - they screwed up. But they don't deserve to lose their land, their country, their homes, their nation, lock stock and barrel (which would not begin to pay back the debt as the banks calculate it.) The poison of high stakes debt financing hit them like smallpox hit the Aztecs when the Spanish landed. Wipeout. There was no cultural, individual or institutional immunity whatsoever to the Plague of the Banksters.

Bush got all kinds of grief for invading Iraq, and he more or less left Iraq to the Iraqis in the end. If the Banksters were allowed to conclude this invasion by owning Iceland, land and building, completely, that would be more heinous in my view. It would be without even the allegation that a brutal dictator was removed, a United Nations resolution flaunted, or a mythical WMD ever existed.

Like a child who has screwed up beyond its comprehension, Iceland needs to be punished in a way that will allow it to learn, and then resume its existence, its people mostly going back to fishing if they choose, integrating at some more liesurely and healthy pace into the broader world economy.

And the Banksters who sold these naive fishermen this economic crack should be forced to spend a season at sea, as deckhands on Icelandic fishing boats.

P.S. I found that article. It was in Vanity Fair. I read it at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904. It was written by Michael Lewis, and is entitled "Wall Street on the Tundra"

[Diarmuid]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

Remember the Icelanders?

Your implication here is they those Icelanders are one monolithic group rather then a diverse group of individuals - some individuals in Iceland i.e. the retarded government - were responsible for the devaluation of the Krona. But they all need to pay!

If you believe in the garbage of representative democracy I direct you to this article for a position close to where I stand on this matter

http://mises.org/story/3383

Funny how there is little sympathy for those who had their savings in Old Kronas at the banks in Iceland in 1981. This sympathy street, especially in the leftwing, seems to run just one-way: for the debtors and deadbeats, not the savers and pensioners.

It is exactly with the pensioners and savers and such like i.e. the innocents where my sympathys lie. It seems folly in the extreme to me that a private business when it goes bust has its liabilities transferred to a nation as a whole - banking is the only business where this is "allowed" to happen and moreover iit has happened over and over again as argued in Hudson article - why should my losses be transfered to my neighbour - this is the complete antithesis of socialism what you are adovcating is socialism for the wealthy and connected.:eek:

[occdude]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

I tried to plod through this article but after a few paragraphs I got the point.

Iceland borrowed more than it can pay and on terms that make it impossible to remit.

Iceland needs to declare what in essence is country bankruptcy with all the responsibilities that involves namely commerce on a pay-go system free from debt.

The whole concept that credit makes the world go round is emblematic of what ails the global economy. Credit obfuscates the pain of consuming goods making things seem cheaper than they truly are (as anyone who has had to pay cash versus credit knows full well). This leads to people being foolish with scant resources and one hell of a hangover when the bill comes due.

Iceland needs to do what we all need to do. Declare bankruptcy so they stop trying to service a crushing debt that will only get worse. Decentralize their monetary system by making gold the countries currency to insulate themselves from the folly of a few greedy banksters and inflation minded bearucrats. Do away with fraudulent fractionary reserve banking which would wipe out inflation and prevent overindebtness. Deregulate like hell to spur foreign investment into the few natural resources Iceland has. Finally, lower taxes to further lure foreign investment and make sure it stays.

Icelands economy after just five years of these austere measures would look VERY different from the one at present. But I've outlined a sustainable model of growth that would reflect true economic progress instead of the sham we've been living with for many generations.

Unfortunately the advice Iceland gets will be contemporary and conventional which will only forestall the day of reckoning building cynicism and distrust of markets which should only guarrantee further multigenerational pain.

As the old Bob Dylan song goes "when you aint got nothin, you got nothin to lose" should be a rallying call for a change in not only Icelands economic model, but the global one as well.

[don]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

The solution is obvious: arrange for the fishermen and the banksters to bump into one another on the streets of Reykjavik ;)

[gwynedd1]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

1.
The Financial War Against Iceland
Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare.
By Prof Michael Hudson
http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintAr...rticleId=13055

I haven’t had a chance to ingest the article in full, but, upon skimming it, it seems like a great read.

Hi DrYB/C,

As usual I have nothing to add to Prof Michael Hudson. Its the same thing I have been saying but in his case, with authority. There should always be a local currency available for local trade. A hunter gatherer tribe suddenly being forced to trade in a foreign currency could not trade anymore They would be forced into menial labor just to create enough money to trade between themselves. Currency may be needed to trade outside the clan but it is ruinousness to trade within it. Lots of EU countries are finding out the hard way of using large trading block currencies. Lots of idle local resources and when the capital dries up it will be purchased cheaply by non native interest just like some of the best wine regions were taken from Argentina.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

The solution is obvious: arrange for the fishermen and the banksters to bump into one another on the streets of Reykjavik ;)

The fishmerman will win that one ;).

[rjwjr]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

Go-go investing hit Iceland. It was like selling whiskey to the American Indians (who apparently have a hereditary weakness for alcohol.) They went from a traditional economy that dated centuries back to one of the hottest, leveraged, investing centers in the world, in just a couple or three years. Young males with high testerone levels make excellent day traders.

Yeah - they screwed up. But they don't deserve to lose their land, their country, their homes, their nation, lock stock and barrel (which would not begin to pay back the debt as the banks calculate it.) The poison of high stakes debt financing hit them like smallpox hit the Aztecs when the Spanish landed. Wipeout. There was no cultural, individual or institutional immunity whatsoever to the Plague of the Banksters.

Like a child who has screwed up beyond its comprehension, Iceland needs to be punished in a way that will allow it to learn, and then resume its existence, its people mostly going back to fishing if they choose, integrating at some more liesurely and healthy pace into the broader world economy.

And the Banksters who sold these naive fishermen this economic crack should be forced to spend a season at sea, as deckhands on Icelandic fishing boats.

Sorry, I can't agree with this perspective. IMHO you are letting them off the hook for their behavior by telling them it's not their fault. It is their fault. Many, many individuals may have the addictions, predispositions, cultural biases, or whatever else you want to blame these actions on, but not everyone acts upon them. The key to maintaining a civilized, functioning society is personal responsibility! Your "I couldn't help myself" rationalization is extremely dangerous, me thinks.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

It is their fault.

Partially.

But when the same debt cartels (the World Banksters) sink country after country this way, the fault lies not entirely with the sunken countries.

If the entire fault lay with Iceland, and if justice required that they pay up the claimed debt entirely, then Iceland would become a wholly owned subsidary of a few big banks, and an economy, culture and nation of many generations would be wiped off the earth, the people of Iceland to become permanent rent payers, forever impoverished in their unpayable debt.

The entire fault does not lie with Iceland, this would be an excessive penalty, and the contracts which the Banksters extracted from the people and businesses of Iceland were deceptive to the point (well past the point) of fraud.

The people of Iceland need to learn, for a long time, to beware of such fraudulent business. But it is not in the best interest of them or us to destroy them in perpetuity. They were, and can return to be, a healthy element of human civilization.

The Bankster fraud of the last few centuries, culiminating in its immense peak of the last few decades, needs to be cut way down. We still need banks, clearing of financial transfers between third parties, saving and borrowing of money, paying of interest on borrowed money, mortgages, bonds for businesses and governments, insurance policies, and various other financial services. But we need such at a much reduced proportion of our total human economy, and with a renewed ethics.

Those who knowingly purpetrated such fraud on their fellow humans must be punished. The extraordinary imbalances and non-transparent financial transactions will make unwinding this matter difficult. Justice will not always be served. Some innocents will be crushed, and some guilty get off scott free with their ill begotten goods.

We lack, other than in the free market itself, a global mechanism to serve this justice, and what large institutions we have now are so corrupted by the very worst of the perpetrators that any imaginable effort to institute such a global court could only be yet another devious scheme by the most guilty to escape justice.

Much of what is about to transpire will seem terribly unfair, though to a considerable extent it will just be making manifest acts of great injustice that have already occurred.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Financial War Against Iceland By Prof Michael Hudson

Interesting article in the New Yorker

about debt/bankruptcy

Most countries outlawed debtor’s prison in the 1800’s.

Your term in jail was not fixed. You got out when someone paid your debt.

There was a strong notion that you had stashed cash somewhere.

In reality, about half the time prisoners were actually broke and so were all their friends and relatives.

You couldn’t earn any money in prison. duh!

Repeatedly, surveys were done showing half of all debtors owed less than 20 pence or 20 cents, in other words...nothing.

Debt often led to slavery.

The American Revolution was in big part debt repudiation.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were massively in debt to British creditors.