I've just finished reading a new vanity fair article on Iceland. For those who aren't familiar with this story, Iceland is and has been its own little enclave for 1100 years. The people are pretty inbred (not trying to be rude, but they're isolated, so its true). The country is small. About 50% of the country attends every bjork concert.
It's the size of Kentucky. It's energy independent. And they have a lot of fish. They've been fairly prosperous and have been able to send their kids to foreign schools, and basically turn fish into Ph.D's. The problem is, people with Ph.D's don't often want on fishing boats or in thermal energy. Iceland can't export the thermal energy so it's basically landlocked.
Large number of educated eccentric inbred and somewhat reckless people begging to find some work of importance? Enter international finance, and enter failure.
The article is absolutely hilarious. I laughed out loud several times. I want to make clear, though, that it's not lambasting Iceland or the people from there. It's just trying to provide an image of this eccentric group of people and how they went from confused to self-sufficient to abject failure in such a short time. A lot of the story is character development on the country as a whole. A lot is also finance / economics. A lot is psychology.
I'll just post my favorite excerpt, which doesn't have to do with banking. Just beware, though. The article is finance intensive. But it's an easy read even for the layman. I fully encourage all willing to follow the link.
Favorite paragraph below:
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?printable=true¤tPage=all