Heh - big-assed payback Icelandic style
Investment bankers from England and the Netherlands tried to game Iceland's biggest bank to make money. They fubared and the bank collapsed leaving them $5.3 Billion in the hole. They want their money back (too big to fail?).
Voters in Iceland -- not so fast big boy... From the
New York Times:
Voters in Iceland Appear to Reject Repayment Plan
Iceland’s voters expressed their outrage on Saturday against bankers, the government and what they saw as foreign bullying, overwhelmingly rejecting a plan to pay $5.3 billion to Britain and the Netherlands to reimburse customers of a failed Icelandic bank.
With about 30 percent of the votes counted, roughly 93 percent of voters said no to the plan, in the first public referendum ever held on any subject in Iceland. Less than 2 percent voted yes, and the rest of the votes were invalid.
Gotta love the blatant media bias from the grey lady:
Appear to Reject when it's a 93% majority to reject... More:
The vote shows the depth of Icelanders’ rage. They are angry at the British and Dutch, who they say are mistreating them; angry at the regulators and government officials who failed to properly oversee the Icelandic financial system; and angry at the bankers whose recklessness helped the economy grow at a headspinning rate and then caused it to self-destruct in days.
“Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers,” President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said on Bloomberg Television.
How to repay the debt, which represents more than 40 percent of Iceland’s gross domestic product, has consumed this small, isolated nation for the last year and a half, since its banks failed, its stock market crashed and its currency collapsed.
Had the great joy to backpack through Iceland back in the 70's -- love the place, love the culture and love the people. Glad to see that they still have that wonderful spirit of independence. Theirs is the longest continuously running parliamentary government starting in 930 at ̃ingvellir.
Posted by DaveH at March 7, 2010 1:16 PM
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