Iceland Proves Ireland Did ‘Wrong Things’ Sacrificing Taxpayers

[Joanne98]

On his second day as head of Iceland’s third-largest bank, Arni Tomasson faced a crisis: The firm he had been asked by regulators to run was out of cash.

It was Oct. 8, 2008, at the height of the global financial meltdown, and Iceland’s bank assets in the U.K. had been frozen, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue. Customers flocked to branches of Tomasson’s Glitnir Banki hf to withdraw money, even though the government had guaranteed their deposits. By the end of the day, the vaults were empty, says Tomasson, recalling the drama two years later.

The only way Glitnir and other lenders could avoid a panic the next morning was to get more cash, which they were having trouble doing. A container of crisp kronur sat on the tarmac at Reykjavik’s airport awaiting payment, Tomasson says. The British company that printed the bills, De La Rue Plc, was demanding sterling, and the central bank couldn’t access its U.K. account.

“Everybody was panicked -- depositors, creditors, banks around the world,” Tomasson says. “The effort by all of us at the time was to make sure life could go on as normal.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-01/iceland-proves-ireland-did-wrong-things-saving-banks-instead-of-taxpayer.html

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[hedgehog]

2. Absolutely recommend - When all this was going down, there was speculation that

Iceland was going to starve since it wouldn't be able to pay for imported food.

[BklynThirtyThree]

3. +1

Excellent article

[Hydra]

4. This part was telling:

Loans were also made to companies in which bank executives and owners had stakes or which were controlled by their friends, according to dozens of lawsuits initiated by regulators and resolution committees. Kaupthing lent 1.5 trillion kronur to such related parties, often without collateral, Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said in 2009.

I have to wonder how much outright lawbreaking we'd discover if we had neutral investigations of our banks and other financial players from the meltdown.

[Mopar151]

5. The smell would rival a pig barn in July..... n/t

[upi402]

6. Law-breaking, if banksters forgot a bit of law-making

They are foxes in charge of the hen house.
And all we can do now is 'cluck', at least until there's an opposition party to this criminality.

But the TV says it's the reasonable thing to do, the way of the future, the invisible hand of the market knows best; regulation = bad, investigate crimes = bad, rule of law = bad.