Will Greece Pull an Iceland … And Tell the Banks to Pound Sand?

Posted on November 2, 2011
by WashingtonsBlog
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Iceland Told the Banks to Pound Sand … And Thereby Saved Its Economy

Iceland told the banks to pound sand. And Iceland’s economy is doing much better than virtually all of the country’s who have let the banks push them around.

Barry Ritholtz noted in May:

Rather than bailout the banks — Iceland could not have done so even if they wanted to — they guaranteed deposits (the way our FDIC does), and let the normal capitalistic process of failure run its course.

They are now much much better for it than the countries like the US and Ireland who did not.

Bloomberg pointed out in February:

Unlike other nations, including the U.S. and Ireland, which injected billions of dollars of capital into their financial institutions to keep them afloat, Iceland placed its biggest lenders in receivership. It chose not to protect creditors of the country’s banks, whose assets had ballooned to $209 billion, 11 times gross domestic product.

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“Iceland did the right thing by making sure its payment systems continued to function while creditors, not the taxpayers, shouldered the losses of banks,â€