Please point to where the Icelandic government guaranteed the solvency of the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme.
They never did. The decision to compensate Icelanders for their losses was purely a choice. Iceland could decide to give everyone Icelander who had an Icesave account a pony. Would that mean that they also owe every British person a pony?
People like that need to stop reading leftist blogs (full disclosure: I waver between calling myself "liberal" and "socialist") and even foreign reporting (which is sometimes almost as bad) and read the Icelandic press directly. Don't worry, there's English language sources.
That is simply not correct. There's a record of the region being called terms similar to Scandinavia all the way back to Pliny the Elder. And the penninsula does cover all of Scandinavia, because that's what it is. If you want to include Finland, it's "Fenno-Scandinavia". If you want to include Iceland and Finland, it's "Nordic". Although I personally object to Finland being called Nordic, as they speak a language unrelated to Old Norse, and if you're going to include Finland, you really need to include Estonia too... but I digress.
Now, of course, Icelanders will often talk about how "Scandinavian" the culture is and things of that nature. But it's distinctly not a Scandinavian country. It's a Nordic country.
You realize that that is a total myth, don't you? Starting with the words "bankers shakedown"; what you're referring to was never a conflict between banks or bankers, but between the government of Iceland and the governments of the UK and Netherlands.
Figured this sort of tripe would run rampant in this article. Let's go down the list.
1) Surprisingly well? So that's what you call a housing bubble, money going half as far (in a country that imports most goods it consumes), 30% across-the-board austerity cuts, and currency restrictions which prevent you from buying foreign currencies in any sort of quantity so that you can't escape inflation.
2) "many of the international loans" - no, just the first set of payments. Most of the debt is still quite outstanding.
3) Unemployment rate: First, a quick introduction to Icelandic unemployment figures. This is a brief graph, but what you can see on it and what I'll describe extends before and after it: A) note that unemployment *always* drops in the summer. Farm work strongly peaks in summer here. Summer is the tourist season (tourism being one of the country's biggest industries. Summer is the travel season (all the biggest festivals are in the summer). Etc. So it's rather a "duh" thing that unemployment is dropping in the summer. B) Iceland has long had (much longer than in the graph) an *abnormally low* unemployment rate, typically between 1 and 3 percent, but sometimes even lower than 1%. So the current figures are *way* over what is normal here.
4) Iceland fell way further and earlier than most of Europe. It'd be practically a miracle to *not* grow faster.
5) Iceland didn't officially bail out the banks, but it did so indirectly, via using a lot of the money from the aforementioned loans to shore up the cost of restructuring the banks.
6) Paying off Icelandic depositors may lose us the EFTA Icesave case.:P Not saying it was a bad choice, but it could have serious negative consequences.
7) The "debt relief to struggling homeowners" (wow, can you make that sound any more like a poltical talking point?) was due to one of the screwed up things about the Icelandic banking system that almost no other developed country on Earth has: foreign-currency-indexed loans. Which means that when the króna fell to half its value, principals owed *doubled*. These types of loans were illegal to grant in the first place, and eventually a court ruled as such. The government responded by meeting the ruling wit the most pro-bank option possible, converting some of the loans to standard loans at higher rates, within limits.
BTW, homeowners with non-indexed loans here not only pay high rates, but also have to pay a (not cheap) insurance on their loan against currency spikes. FYI to all of you people out there who don't live here who keep talking about how Iceland needs to stay on the króna, it rather sucks having a weak currency.
I can go into the rest of the article, but I figured I'd just do the part you quoted.
And this isn't to say that I disagree with all the steps Iceland's taken. Actually, I agree with most of them. But it's not the rosy picture that the foreign press wants to paint, looking for some happy-populist-utopia to lead the way out of the crisis. Hell, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, the conservatives, the ones who caused this mess, are leading in the polls right now, having more support than *both* of the parties in the current coalition combined.
Indeed. Here's the last thing that the Icelandic supreme court made the news for.:P
What makes it so ridiculous is that it's Goldfinger and Strawberries who are the ones who should have been slapped down by the court, not journalists reporting on them. They're so blatantly circumventing the law. Basically, strip clubs were made illegal in Iceland (to try to prevent trafficking and exploitation, not for moral reasons), so they reclassified themselves as bars and simply had the girls come in and work on their own without any legal connection between the two. So they're still strip clubs, just not legally.
Iceland is not doing "just fine", and Iceland largely did what it was told by the international community (including becoming the IMF's new poster child) - just not what the British and Dutch demanded it do. There's a lot of myths about Iceland going around (which Krugman gives a wink and a nudge to by posting grossly misleading stats). Trust me on this one, I live in Iceland. The country got slammed, and is far from a "happily ever after" story. The only reason we're growing faster than most of Europe is that we went a lot further down than most of Europe, earlier. It'd be practically impossible not to.
And I say this as someone who supports the Samfylkingin / Vinstri Grænn coalition. Which is probably going to get pummeled by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (the conservatives, who caused this mess) in the next election.:P
Indeed. It's hard for people to picture how big the scale of the Icelandic banking crisis was. The banks weren't just big by Icelandic standards, they were big by global standards, in a country of only 320,000 people. Remember how big of a deal Lehman Brothers was? Picture 300 Lehman Brothers failing at once. That's the Icelandic per-capita equivalent when the three major banks went down. Here's what happened to the Icelandic stock market.
Not to mention that the Fascists ruled it from the 1920s to the 1940s and banned all other political parties from participating. Of course Iceland is problematic in and of itself in that Denmark banned the Al(th)ing from 1800 to 1845.
Like the people who had their money in Lehman Brothers? Sorry, but there's a difference between a regular bank account and an investment account. Icesave was a program predominantly for retirement funds and municipal investment funds. It wasn't a checking account program.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080225152959/http://icesave.co.uk/legal.html: "Deposits made with Icesave are protected under the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme (details of this scheme may be obtained from www.landsbanki.com/legislation). Payments under this scheme are limited to the first €20,887 (or the sterling equivalent) of your total deposits held with us. You have further protection from the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (www.fscs.org.uk). Payments under this scheme are limited to 100% of the first £35,000 of all your deposits with us, less any payments made under the Icelandic scheme. This means that the maximum claim amount as at October 2007 is £35,000. The total financial protection given to you under both schemes is no less than you would receive if your deposit was only protected by the UK scheme. Further details about both schemes can be obtained from our web site or by post, on request."
Following the Icelandic side's link for the fund that backed the deposits: Hmm, nowhere in here do I see anything about government backing. Do you?
The fund went bankrupt. The British tried to force the government to pick up the bill. Which is frankly BS. The accounts were never guaranteed by the government, you can't make the government suddenly start guaranteeing them *after* a crash.
"Losses" is in quote because the banks actually are, in fact, paying off their minimum insured obligations, and are on track to finish paying them off within the next year or so (they're already half done). The Icelandic government took on huge amounts of debt, in no small part to help prop up the banks and get them back on their feet so they'd be worth enough to sell off enough asset value to do this. And the British and Dutch are still suing us in the EFTA. Gee, thanks. We appreciate the whole mackerel thing, too. How dare Iceland and the Faroes fish a non-negligable portion of a fish that does most of its growing in Icelandic and Faroese waters? Such insolence, I know. Best to pressure the EC to slap sanctions on us for "overfishing" (aka, taking a non-negligible portion of the catch) when you refuse to negotiate.
I think in most cases, they honestly don't know any better, followed by as the next most likely reason, they were too lazy. Sinister reasons is probably number three. I doubt optimization makes the top 10.
when will people ever learn? And not just SQL injection attacks. I had to actually write a destructive exploit for a popen injection attack on a MMORPG before the rest of the dev team would believe me that it was a serious vulnerability (it had code that if you said a URL, people could click on it... except they were just passing what the user wrote to popen, tacked to the end of your browser-launch string). People just never seem to wrap your head around the fact that you never use raw user input for anything that a parser will look at, at any point in time!
Indeed, RealClimate notes that if you remove dendrochronology records from Mann et al (2008), you actually get a lesser pre-industrial cooling trend. Of the dozens of independent lines of evidence, tree rings have long been one of the *least* suggestive of disproportionately high GHG forcing versus other forcings, so it's always funny to see them called out as though the case for global warming rests on them.;) (The reason that they're often called out is because they're *really tricky* to use well; so many things affect tree growth that have to be accounted for, and the factors vary greatly from location to location)
While these sort of articles were the exception, not the rule, probably 80-90% of mainstream reporting on the topic seemed to mix up the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. Sad.
Venus's problem isn't so much that it has a CO2-based atmosphere, as that it has a *90 atmosphere* CO2-based atmosphere. Even if you removed all of the CO2 and were left with a 3.5 atm nitrogen atmosphere it'd still have a major greenhouse effect (nitrogen isn't generally a greenhouse gas, but at higher densities than are found on Earth, due to the higher collision rate, it gains an induced dipole moment; this is seen on Titan)
As another example, Mars too has a primarily CO2-based atmosphere. But it's a 0.007 atm CO2 atmosphere. Hence, it's frigid instead of burning-hot like Venus.
Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.
There's an old joke in the writing community about how if you're going to write a (real) man into a book as a character and are afraid that he might sue for libel, write him in with a tiny penis. Because the men who would sue and claim, "yes, your honor, I'm the guy with the tiny penis in this book" are few and far between.
Could lead Apple to do the first-ever use of a negative ruling in a legal battle in an ad promoting a product;)
Can you imagine this in other kind of rulings? "I find the defendant not guilty of stealing her purse because he's far too fat to steal anything but a nap, the attacker was described as running away (not waddling), the grease and tomato stains on every shirt he's worn to the court proceedings make it clear that his hands would have been too full of pizza to hold it, and judging from his unimaginably bad test scores, I'm not even sure he could have figured out how to open the zipper."
Slashdot Mirror
Please point to where the Icelandic government guaranteed the solvency of the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme.
They never did. The decision to compensate Icelanders for their losses was purely a choice. Iceland could decide to give everyone Icelander who had an Icesave account a pony. Would that mean that they also owe every British person a pony?
-1, Not At All Related To The Truth
People like that need to stop reading leftist blogs (full disclosure: I waver between calling myself "liberal" and "socialist") and even foreign reporting (which is sometimes almost as bad) and read the Icelandic press directly. Don't worry, there's English language sources.
That is simply not correct. There's a record of the region being called terms similar to Scandinavia all the way back to Pliny the Elder. And the penninsula does cover all of Scandinavia, because that's what it is. If you want to include Finland, it's "Fenno-Scandinavia". If you want to include Iceland and Finland, it's "Nordic". Although I personally object to Finland being called Nordic, as they speak a language unrelated to Old Norse, and if you're going to include Finland, you really need to include Estonia too... but I digress.
Now, of course, Icelanders will often talk about how "Scandinavian" the culture is and things of that nature. But it's distinctly not a Scandinavian country. It's a Nordic country.
You realize that that is a total myth, don't you? Starting with the words "bankers shakedown"; what you're referring to was never a conflict between banks or bankers, but between the government of Iceland and the governments of the UK and Netherlands.
Keep dreaming.
(I live in Iceland).
Figured this sort of tripe would run rampant in this article. Let's go down the list.
1) Surprisingly well? So that's what you call a housing bubble, money going half as far (in a country that imports most goods it consumes), 30% across-the-board austerity cuts, and currency restrictions which prevent you from buying foreign currencies in any sort of quantity so that you can't escape inflation.
2) "many of the international loans" - no, just the first set of payments. Most of the debt is still quite outstanding.
3) Unemployment rate: First, a quick introduction to Icelandic unemployment figures. This is a brief graph, but what you can see on it and what I'll describe extends before and after it: A) note that unemployment *always* drops in the summer. Farm work strongly peaks in summer here. Summer is the tourist season (tourism being one of the country's biggest industries. Summer is the travel season (all the biggest festivals are in the summer). Etc. So it's rather a "duh" thing that unemployment is dropping in the summer. B) Iceland has long had (much longer than in the graph) an *abnormally low* unemployment rate, typically between 1 and 3 percent, but sometimes even lower than 1%. So the current figures are *way* over what is normal here.
4) Iceland fell way further and earlier than most of Europe. It'd be practically a miracle to *not* grow faster.
5) Iceland didn't officially bail out the banks, but it did so indirectly, via using a lot of the money from the aforementioned loans to shore up the cost of restructuring the banks.
6) Paying off Icelandic depositors may lose us the EFTA Icesave case. :P Not saying it was a bad choice, but it could have serious negative consequences.
7) The "debt relief to struggling homeowners" (wow, can you make that sound any more like a poltical talking point?) was due to one of the screwed up things about the Icelandic banking system that almost no other developed country on Earth has: foreign-currency-indexed loans. Which means that when the króna fell to half its value, principals owed *doubled*. These types of loans were illegal to grant in the first place, and eventually a court ruled as such. The government responded by meeting the ruling wit the most pro-bank option possible, converting some of the loans to standard loans at higher rates, within limits.
BTW, homeowners with non-indexed loans here not only pay high rates, but also have to pay a (not cheap) insurance on their loan against currency spikes. FYI to all of you people out there who don't live here who keep talking about how Iceland needs to stay on the króna, it rather sucks having a weak currency.
I can go into the rest of the article, but I figured I'd just do the part you quoted.
And this isn't to say that I disagree with all the steps Iceland's taken. Actually, I agree with most of them. But it's not the rosy picture that the foreign press wants to paint, looking for some happy-populist-utopia to lead the way out of the crisis. Hell, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, the conservatives, the ones who caused this mess, are leading in the polls right now, having more support than *both* of the parties in the current coalition combined.
But is in the EFTA.
Indeed. Here's the last thing that the Icelandic supreme court made the news for. :P
What makes it so ridiculous is that it's Goldfinger and Strawberries who are the ones who should have been slapped down by the court, not journalists reporting on them. They're so blatantly circumventing the law. Basically, strip clubs were made illegal in Iceland (to try to prevent trafficking and exploitation, not for moral reasons), so they reclassified themselves as bars and simply had the girls come in and work on their own without any legal connection between the two. So they're still strip clubs, just not legally.
Iceland is not doing "just fine", and Iceland largely did what it was told by the international community (including becoming the IMF's new poster child) - just not what the British and Dutch demanded it do. There's a lot of myths about Iceland going around (which Krugman gives a wink and a nudge to by posting grossly misleading stats). Trust me on this one, I live in Iceland. The country got slammed, and is far from a "happily ever after" story. The only reason we're growing faster than most of Europe is that we went a lot further down than most of Europe, earlier. It'd be practically impossible not to.
And I say this as someone who supports the Samfylkingin / Vinstri Grænn coalition. Which is probably going to get pummeled by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (the conservatives, who caused this mess) in the next election. :P
Indeed. It's hard for people to picture how big the scale of the Icelandic banking crisis was. The banks weren't just big by Icelandic standards, they were big by global standards, in a country of only 320,000 people. Remember how big of a deal Lehman Brothers was? Picture 300 Lehman Brothers failing at once. That's the Icelandic per-capita equivalent when the three major banks went down. Here's what happened to the Icelandic stock market.
Correct. Iceland is Nordic, not Scandinavian.
People here need to read more Scandinavia and the World (a webcomic that's both funny *and* educational!)
Not to mention that the Fascists ruled it from the 1920s to the 1940s and banned all other political parties from participating. Of course Iceland is problematic in and of itself in that Denmark banned the Al(th)ing from 1800 to 1845.
That's not what Valitor says.
Like the people who had their money in Lehman Brothers? Sorry, but there's a difference between a regular bank account and an investment account. Icesave was a program predominantly for retirement funds and municipal investment funds. It wasn't a checking account program.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080225152959/http://icesave.co.uk/legal.html: "Deposits made with Icesave are protected under the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme (details of this scheme may be obtained from www.landsbanki.com/legislation). Payments under this scheme are limited to the first €20,887 (or the sterling equivalent) of your total deposits held with us. You have further protection from the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (www.fscs.org.uk). Payments under this scheme are limited to 100% of the first £35,000 of all your deposits with us, less any payments made under the Icelandic scheme. This means that the maximum claim amount as at October 2007 is £35,000. The total financial protection given to you under both schemes is no less than you would receive if your deposit was only protected by the UK scheme. Further details about both schemes can be obtained from our web site or by post, on request."
Following the Icelandic side's link for the fund that backed the deposits: Hmm, nowhere in here do I see anything about government backing. Do you?
The fund went bankrupt. The British tried to force the government to pick up the bill. Which is frankly BS. The accounts were never guaranteed by the government, you can't make the government suddenly start guaranteeing them *after* a crash.
Lol, yeah. I like to simply view the British "losses" in the Icesave situation as a late payment for all the cod the British stole from Icelandic waters.
"Losses" is in quote because the banks actually are, in fact, paying off their minimum insured obligations, and are on track to finish paying them off within the next year or so (they're already half done). The Icelandic government took on huge amounts of debt, in no small part to help prop up the banks and get them back on their feet so they'd be worth enough to sell off enough asset value to do this. And the British and Dutch are still suing us in the EFTA. Gee, thanks. We appreciate the whole mackerel thing, too. How dare Iceland and the Faroes fish a non-negligable portion of a fish that does most of its growing in Icelandic and Faroese waters? Such insolence, I know. Best to pressure the EC to slap sanctions on us for "overfishing" (aka, taking a non-negligible portion of the catch) when you refuse to negotiate.
Remember all that electricity you're wanting to buy?...
I think in most cases, they honestly don't know any better, followed by as the next most likely reason, they were too lazy. Sinister reasons is probably number three. I doubt optimization makes the top 10.
when will people ever learn? And not just SQL injection attacks. I had to actually write a destructive exploit for a popen injection attack on a MMORPG before the rest of the dev team would believe me that it was a serious vulnerability (it had code that if you said a URL, people could click on it... except they were just passing what the user wrote to popen, tacked to the end of your browser-launch string). People just never seem to wrap your head around the fact that you never use raw user input for anything that a parser will look at, at any point in time!
Here's probably the funniest discussion thread on injection attacks, ever.
Indeed, RealClimate notes that if you remove dendrochronology records from Mann et al (2008), you actually get a lesser pre-industrial cooling trend. Of the dozens of independent lines of evidence, tree rings have long been one of the *least* suggestive of disproportionately high GHG forcing versus other forcings, so it's always funny to see them called out as though the case for global warming rests on them. ;) (The reason that they're often called out is because they're *really tricky* to use well; so many things affect tree growth that have to be accounted for, and the factors vary greatly from location to location)
Once they eliminate all of the other, non-tree-based lines of evidence, this should finally bust the myth of Northern Scandinavian Warming wide open!
While these sort of articles were the exception, not the rule, probably 80-90% of mainstream reporting on the topic seemed to mix up the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. Sad.
Okie dokie.
Venus's problem isn't so much that it has a CO2-based atmosphere, as that it has a *90 atmosphere* CO2-based atmosphere. Even if you removed all of the CO2 and were left with a 3.5 atm nitrogen atmosphere it'd still have a major greenhouse effect (nitrogen isn't generally a greenhouse gas, but at higher densities than are found on Earth, due to the higher collision rate, it gains an induced dipole moment; this is seen on Titan)
As another example, Mars too has a primarily CO2-based atmosphere. But it's a 0.007 atm CO2 atmosphere. Hence, it's frigid instead of burning-hot like Venus.
Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.
There's an old joke in the writing community about how if you're going to write a (real) man into a book as a character and are afraid that he might sue for libel, write him in with a tiny penis. Because the men who would sue and claim, "yes, your honor, I'm the guy with the tiny penis in this book" are few and far between.
Michael Crichton kind of went overboard with this one, though.
Could lead Apple to do the first-ever use of a negative ruling in a legal battle in an ad promoting a product ;)
Can you imagine this in other kind of rulings? "I find the defendant not guilty of stealing her purse because he's far too fat to steal anything but a nap, the attacker was described as running away (not waddling), the grease and tomato stains on every shirt he's worn to the court proceedings make it clear that his hands would have been too full of pizza to hold it, and judging from his unimaginably bad test scores, I'm not even sure he could have figured out how to open the zipper."