"Despite sunny skies yesterday after three days of unseasonably cold weather"
GLOBAL WARMING, huh?
Update: Russia backing Iceland as world crisis spreads
"Iceland teeters near the brink of bankruptcy; Government negotiating Russian loan" by Jane Wardell, Associated Press | October 8, 2008
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - This volcanic island near the Arctic Circle is on the brink of becoming the first "national bankruptcy" of the global financial meltdown.
Home to just 320,000 people on a territory the size of Kentucky, Iceland has formidable international reach because of an outsized banking sector that set out with Viking confidence to conquer swaths of the British economy - from fashion retailers to top soccer teams.
The strategy gave Icelanders one of the world's highest per capita incomes. But now they are watching helplessly as their economy implodes - their currency losing almost half its value, and their heavily exposed banks collapsing under the weight of debts incurred by lending in the boom times.
Does that SOUND FAMILIAR, Amurkns?
A full-blown collapse of Iceland's financial system would send shock waves across Europe, given the heavy investment by Icelandic banks and companies across the continent. One of Iceland's biggest companies, retailing investment group Baugur, owns or has stakes in dozens of major European retailers - including enough to make it the largest private company in Britain, where it owns a handful of stores such as the famous toy store Hamley's.
Kaupthing, Iceland's largest bank and one of those whose share trading was suspended last week to stop a huge sell-off, has also invested in European retail groups. Thousands of Britons have accounts with Icesave, the online arm of Landsbanki that regulators said was likely to file for bankruptcy after it stopped permitting customers to withdraw money from their accounts yesterday.
To try to wrest control of the spiraling situation, the government also loaned $680 million to Kaupthing to tide it over and said it was negotiating a $5.4 billion loan from Russia to shore up the nation's finances.
Maybe America should reconsider the antagonistic attitude towards Russia. Of course, that would mean flipping the finger to the Zionist bankers!
The speed of Iceland's downfall in the week since it announced it was nationalizing Glitnir bank, the country's third largest, caught many by surprise despite warnings that it was the "canary in the coal mine" of the global credit squeeze.
Despite sunny skies yesterday after three days of unseasonably cold weather, Reykjavik's mood remained grim - cafes were half-empty, real estate agents sat idle, and retailers reported few sales. Icelanders are also beginning to question how a relative few were able to generate the disproportionate wealth - and associated debt - that Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde has warned puts the entire country at risk of bankruptcy.
Iceland's reinvention from the poor cousin in Europe to one of the region's wealthiest countries dates to the deregulation of the banking industry and the creation of the domestic stock market in the mid-1990s. Those free market reforms turned Iceland from a conservative, inward-looking country to one of a new generation of internationally educated young businessmen and women who were determined to give Iceland a modern profile far beyond its fishing base.
Translation: GLOBALISTS took over Iceland! I knew a guy in the service once, and he told me that in the 1980s, everyone in Iceland had UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE! I wonder if they still do.
Entrepreneurs become its greatest export, as banks and companies marched across Europe and their acquisition wallets were filled by a stock market boom and a well-funded pension system. But the whole system was built on a shaky foundation of foreign debt. --more--"
Almost like LOOKING in a MIRROR, huh, Amurka?
