Meltdown Iceland
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`It is hard to think of a European country more incompetently run in the past 20 years than Iceland ... Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely year after some of the events it describes' --Sunday Times
`Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely a year after some of the events it describes. He knows Iceland well and conveys the strangeness of the landscape, the dogged decency of its people and the endless "white nights" of the Arctic summer' --Robert Harris, Sunday Times
`Boyes, an award-winning foreign correspondent who has been reporting in Icelandic affaires for the past three decades, gives an admirably succinct account of the Kreppa's causes and effects. He shows the complex interweaving and rivalries within and between its nascent oligarchies, invariably with a telling detain to illuminate each stage of the descent into economic chaos'
--Scotsman
`Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely a year after some of the events it describes. He knows Iceland well and conveys the strangeness of the landscape, the dogged decency of its people and the endless "white nights" of the Arctic summer' --Robert Harris, Sunday Times
`Boyes, an award-winning foreign correspondent who has been reporting in Icelandic affaires for the past three decades, gives an admirably succinct account of the Kreppa's causes and effects. He shows the complex interweaving and rivalries within and between its nascent oligarchies, invariably with a telling detain to illuminate each stage of the descent into economic chaos'
--Scotsman
Product Description
It is a truism that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. The subprime mortgage crisis, which began in America in 2007, unleashed a veritable epidemic of financial ill health all over the world. All European countries were affected, and the developing world also felt a chill. However it was Iceland, a tiny volcanic outcrop in the North Atlantic whose population of 300,000 had the highest GDP and counted itself the happiest in the world, which caught the worst cold. It has nearly killed them. For a few short years, the Icelanders deluded themselves that they were rich. Dour Reykjavik became the Capital of Cool. Rock musicians like Damon Albarn bought houses and stakes in pubs. Clubs boomed, the alcohol was expensive and the Krona was strong. All over the world people are trying to understand what caused the economic crisis and are asking themselves who is to blame. In Iceland that question is easily answered and the handful of bankers and politicians responsible have had to hire body guards, hole themselves up in their country houses and stay off the streets for fear of attack. Collaborating with the business editor of Iceland's leading daily newspaper, award-winning writer Roger Boyes tells the inside story of the bankrupting of Iceland and explains how it has ramifications for us all, from the private and public investors who trusted their money in Iceland's banks, to the workers in high street clothes stores whose owners no longer can pay for the shirts on their own backs. Writing with panache and colour, and drawing on interviews with everyone from artists and policitians to the local fisherman, Meltdown Iceland is an authoritative and compelling account of the financial destruction of this tiny, icy but vibrant country.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Helicopter journalism,
By JonJonsson (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankupted an Entire Country (Hardcover)
When I bought this book I was excited to get the British side of the Icelandic story. Sadly the book has almost nothing to offer in that regard. The author seems to have written the book after having stayed for few weeks in Iceland and taking interviews with a selected group of people. However, for some reason he does not have taken the care to let some native or someone with an intimate knowledge of Iceland read the manuscript before publication since the book is full of factual errors and either incomplete or incorrect rendering of events that could have been easily corrected by almost any person taken off the street of Reykjavik. Quite often Mr. Boyes just echoes urban legends, such that Icelanders all believe in elves, or simply takes direct sentences and clichés from tourist guides. Worse still, is apparent that Mr. Boyes has very limited knowledge of both finance and banking and thus takes very dubious shortcuts in explaining chain of events. There are people in Iceland that believe, like Mr. Boyes, that the banking collapse in Iceland can best be explained as a personal duel between Jon Asgeir Johannesson the "owner" of Baugur and Glitnir and the former Central Bank governor and Prime Minister David Oddsson. However, for most informed observers that is both a cheap and simplified explanation. The same goes for many of the other analysis Mr. Boyes offers in this book. I, for one, doubt that Jon Asgeir Johannesson got the terrible urge to launch his "financial invasion" of Britain as a child during the Cod Wars between Iceland and Britain in the 1970's.
I have no doubt that Mr. Boyes is a clever and experienced journalist. In some cases it is quite interesting to read an outsider's perspective on the events in Iceland. However, there must be some minimal level of field work and research outsiders must do to be able to write a credible and accurate account of such drastic and deep ranging social and economic events in a foreign country. Sadly, it seems that Mr. Boyes did not have the time go rise above that threshold when writing this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
(n)iceland,
By
This review is from: Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankupted an Entire Country (Hardcover)
I have read with great interest this book written with a pleasant prose.
Being half Italian I am - unfortunately - used to misgovernment and it has been astonishing to read how a country, always depicted as nearly perfect in all fields, could become a sort of international "pariah" after swallowing savings from various European countries threatening not to return them even ! The easy and tautological concept "when investing in something risky you can get higher interests on one hand but on the other you get higher risks" (and therefore may lose your amount of money) should be written on walls in our Western world. The fruit of greed has impoverished so many Europeans, but we must also remember how some banks have used savings, forgetting that behind a bank account number there are families, children, elders, HUMAN BEINGS with their hopes sorrows expectations etc. A new ethics is compulsory in the finance world, but I am very dubious that the lesson have been useful and understood. Congratulations to Mr Boyes and an invitations to reluctant people to read his book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thought Iceland had clean government? Think again.,
By John Reardon (Carlisle, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankupted an Entire Country (Hardcover)
Meltdown Iceland is completely gripping, and tells the inside story of how Iceland bankrupted itself in 2009. Roger Boyes writes with knowledge and insight into Icelandic society.
At the height of the crsis in 2009 about two thousand Icelanders regularly gathered outside the national parliament in Reykjavik. Boyes points out that's the equivalent of two million Americans marching on Washington DC. I particularly liked the part when he points out that protesters were the cousins of riot police who in turn were related to the deputies inside parliament. Boyes argues that in that sort of context personal feuds and individual personalities become so much more pronounced than would otherwise be the case. Add to that a media that fails to seek out a counternarrative to events and you have a system with, in reality, few real checks and balances. Moreover, structural interdependency between business, financial and political elites becomes then threatens to undermine everything. The scale of cronyism, corruption and greed in Iceland that preceded the crash is quite astonishing. Most of the players were at school with each other. How they ever thought such a small society would be able to clock up such monumental debts without it all crashing down is indicative of the mindset that prevailed at the time. Whilst Iceland is, obviously, similar to other places in microcosm, when they feel they feel much harder than any other western society. The Icelandic krona is the smallest independent currency in the world and there have to be questions about how sustainable it is in the long run. It will be interesting in the next few years to see where Iceland's relationship with the EU goes. Issues around fisheries have understandably kept Iceland out, but it's not as if they can now seek solace within the EU or via security of a single currency as originally suggested when the crisis was at its worst. An excellent primer on the global crisis in general and Iceland in particular.
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