This and this and particularly this may go some way to explain why the UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the British assets of the Icelandic banks when they went bust, a move that was widely decried at the time.
Iceland was always a beautiful country with good, hard-working people, but now there's something rotten in the state of Iceland and it's not just a load of old cod. The Icelandic people seem extremely angry with their financial and political elites, and frankly I don't blame them.
IMO it's very significant that a government regulator seems have been near the centre of the web. Regulation is probably not the solution.
ReplyDeleteHmm, you'll have difficulty selling that view at the moment I think. While I agree that regulation-by-mandarin's-fiat is precisely not the way to go, I wonder if regulation with respect to transparency would be so bad. Perhaps if banks had to publish details of loans made to shareholders, senior officers and board members...?
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