The Smartest Guys in the Room

Glitnir and Landsbanki seem to be unfortunate businesses ruined, as many other banks in the world, by the global economic crisis.  Kaupthing, on the other hand, will someday be known as the Icelandic equivalent of Enron.

GTB

Lánuðu sjálfum sér milljarða

In Poker it's Called Showing Your Hand

It may not have been the smartest thing for Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson to announce he wants his party, Framsóknarflokkurinn to be part of a left government in the upcoming elections. I have been singing their party's praise for playing a middle of the road game and therefore exercising some control over the direction of the government and now the gig is up.  They could have continued to support the next government and held on to the no confidence vote threat and got their way on almost all issues.  But alas, the allure of having a minister seat or two is too strong to deny. But Sigmundur is running the risk of marginalizing his smaller percentage even more.  As Smári Jökull Jónsson puts it, and I agree with his logic here, why vote then for Framsóknarflokkurinn? http://smarijokull.blog.is/blog/smarijokull/entry/820906/ If people want a left government, Samfylking and VG would be the best choice so why not just vote for them?   Framsóknarflokkurinn was doing fine tempering the government so it did not lean too far left, but now we see their cards.  It would have been wiser to keep bluffing.

GTB

Vill vera í vinstri stjórn

They're Back!

Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn has the largest political party in Iceland again with 29 percent of people polled favoring them.  I stated in a previous blog they had a chance for a comeback http://www.gregg.blog.is/blog/gregg/entry/814993/ and I would even predict that their percentage will be higher- 33 to 38 percent- for the election.  Old habits die hard and this outcome should not be unexpected.  However no party will likely have the political stomach to join with them again to form a majority. Framsóknarflokkurinn is the only real wildcard for who Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn can depend on and that is looking more and more unlikey.  At least for this election.  Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn should probably get used to sitting in opposition for the next couple of years.   By the way, does anyone know what year the following election will be held? Is it 2011 as previously scheduled or now 2013?  

GTB

 

Sjálfstæðisflokkur með mest fylgi

Those Asshole American/British/Icelanders

Yesterday I posted a blog called Asshole Capitalist. I guess the title caught people's attention because the page got the most hits it ever got in one day. By the way the title is not my invention but was taken from the article "Wall Street on the Tundra"-

The rocks beneath Reykjavík may be igneous, but the city feels sedimentary: on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist.

I think everyone can agree that this is a good title for the current crisis in Iceland and around the world. 

So I did post a few excerpts from the article. And except for the last paragraph, I did it not because I thought they were true, but because I thought they were humorous. Actually the whole angle to Lewis' article was intended to provoke and so I commented as little as possible on it and just put it out there.  And "out there" it stayed without anyone really commenting on it, at least on my blog.  On the blogging network there was plenty of comments- one person even described the Lewis' article as Kreppaklám.( Crisis porn). then right before the day is over this gets posted-

 Hjákátlegt þegar slúðurdálkahöfundur fer í sparifötinn og fer að skrifa um hluti sem hann hefur ekki vit á eða ræður við.  Þett er dæmigerð tröllasaga fyrir trúgjarna og illa upplýsta lesendur þar sem meira er gert með groddalegar rangtúlkanir og afbakanir í trausti þess að lesandinn hafi jafnvel minni þekkingu á málefninu en sjálfur höfundurinn, sem hefur augljóslega hitt í mark hjá Gregg.

Greinin er öll gegnsýrð af þeim hroka og dónaskap sem einkennir alla framkomu engilsaxa þegar þeir heimsækja þjóð sem þeir telja vera fyrir neðan sína eigin í goggunarröðinni, eitthvað sem Gregg augljóslega þjáist af.

Annars hafa íslendingar almennt það orð á sér að vera viðfeldnir og kurteisir, jafnt heima hjá sér og annars staðar, eitthvað sem ekki er hægt að segja um þjóðir eins og bandaríkjamenn og breta sem umturnast í hrokafulla dóna þegar þeir bregða sér útfyrir eigin landamæri.  Ég meina, við hvernig viðmóti býst mannfílan þegar hann gerir sér það að leik að ganga á fólk úti á götu?  Heimboð í kaffi og kleinur?

Annars er þetta karlahaturskjaftæði með eindæmum og ótrúlegt flæðið af greinum sem eru gegnsýrðar af þessu óhefta karlhatri sem  og hvert helvítis fíflið á fætur öðru er að dásama út í gegn.  Þessiúrhrök yrðu æf ef svona væri skrifað um gyðinga, konur, svertingja eða aðra hópa, en ef það er um hvíta karla vætir það brækurnar af hrifningu og hrýn afkátínu.

To which I responded (with the spelling now corrected here)

Bjarni,

Yes! Finally! Someone has the balls to write something with some meat to it.  I thought this blog was going to stay up the whole day without anybody objecting to it.  And you did it in Icelandic too. I almost can't stop smiling. Why doesn't everybody write in Icelandic? I don't do it because I would never want to cause Icelanders that much pain.  I mean they can see I'm reading the news in Icelandic so I must be able to comprehend something. Although to be honest I struggled through what you wrote, what with words like  "karlahaturskjaftæði " (man hating bullshit?). That one is definitely not in the dictionary. 

To be honest I found Lewis's article more entertaining than informative.  And of course he is making some broad generalizations about Icelanders in general and Icelandic men in specific. But all generalizations are built on some small grain of truth and I really can relate to the "bumping into" thing.  Not so much on the street but definitely in a bar.  Every foreigner I know who has lived here for some time will tell the same story.  I have relayed this to my Icelandic friends and they have no idea what I'm talking about.  I could take you to a packed bar in the US or The UK and walk from one end to the other and you would never touch a soul.  And if you did you would most certainly apologize for it. 

Sure British and Americans, especially Americans can be the worst tourists, the ugly tourists.  What I can say here is Icelanders have no problem dishing out the criticism (sometimes quite enjoyably) but are not really good at taking it.  Lewis has a point in saying that the Icelanders ignored criticism of their banks partly because of their cultural superiority complex.  Icelanders will tell you they have the best of everything.  Some of it is true.  The best water, cleanest air, pehaps the most beautiful women, but hey, I lived in California and if I hear one more Icelander tell me that they have the best pot in the world I think I will puke.

And what about this man hating bullshit. Lewis was a bit overboard in this theme , especially "the Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix." paragraph. I work with Icelanders every day and the reason they try and fix everything is because they usually can. But when it came to the financial crisis even Icelanders themselves were convinced the men were the problem. They immediately put women over two of the three banks, and both Sjálfstæðisflokkur and Samfylking competed to put the first woman prime minister in power to clean up the mess. So again there is a grain of truth in the story.

I do agree that if Lewis had wrote about jews, women, blacks or some other minority in this way it would have created a firestorm.   That is just one of the disadvantages of being a white male. And as disadvantages go that ain't much.

GTB

If there is something I've learned about Icelanders, it is they like to talk to foreigners (well at least they did in the good ol' days) . They like to talk to the British about football and the Cod Wars, and they like to talk to Americans about presidents and all the other wars.  Icelanders like to talk about football, presidents and wars so they can make their own comments about them.  Sometimes these comments can be quite critical.  Believe me, I have taken my fair share of abuse, especially when Bush was president.  Being American or British or anyone from a large country opens you up to criticism for many things, many things you have nothing to do with.  I am used to that.  I could never read other people's blog pages here in Iceland if I wasn't.

If there is something else I've learned (and I noted this to Bjarni) is Icelanders are not very fond of any type of criticism. Scarcastic, humorous, or otherwise. If you ever watched a British (and to a lesser extent American) sitcom you would have to agree they are generally quite funny.  My friends and I have a theory for this. You see the British and Americans are such large and diversified countries that they are used to taking criticism about, well, everything.  And they have learned how to see the truth in the criticism they receive and turn it into humor.  Basically, they have grown tired of everyone else making fun of them and learned how to make fun of themselves.  When you make fun of yourself you are doing so by seeing through the eyes of others and so you learn a little bit, not about yourself, but about everyone else. Ultimately, you gain an understanding of why they are so critical; because there is a small truth to it. 

To be honest the Icelanders, being so small a nation and so isolated, have never really faced any real criticism.  They have mostly been heaped with praise about their history, language, fish management, geothermal energy and so on. Up until the crisis.  When Iceland became a world player financially, they opened the door to not only world praise but world criticism.   Although Lewis' article had some grain of truth to it, I never once thought the trash he was writing was at all serious, just funny.  I can see the humor in it because I can see the Iceland that he was looking at. Icelanders got a small taste of this humor from one of their own when Jón Gnarr and crew did the New Years Eve show (skaup).  This was probably one of the best New Years Eve shows ever but I know plenty of (mainly older) Icelanders who thought it was not funny.  They couldn't see the humor because it was about them and they haven't yet learned how to make fun of themselves.

  There will be whole volumes of books written about the world crisis and Iceland is going to make up several chapters. Icelanders need to grow a tougher skin and get used to criticism because this is only the beginning. Just wait until someone reports on Kaupthing as the new Enron. Then the shit will really hit the fan. Until Icelanders can see the humor in the whole thing they will never be able to see all the small truths that are there and never be capable of learning from them.

GTB  

 

Asshole Capitalist

I just finished reading the article by Michael Lewis called "Wall Street on the Tundra".  This may be one of the more interesting articles on the Icelandic economic crisis.  It does not so much explain what happened in Iceland in the boring technical, economic terms as it does explain what happened in more entertaining and revealing cultural terms.  The article shows a side to Icelandic culture only a foreigner can take note of. Lewis describes Iceland as male dominated and basically says it was the men who ruined the country. Here are some lines from the article-

The best way to see any city is to walk it, but everywhere I walk Icelandic men plow into me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just for fun I march up and down the main shopping drag, playing chicken, to see if any Icelandic male would rather divert his stride than bang shoulders. Nope.

I will soon learn that Icelandic males, like moose, rams, and other horned mammals, see these collisions as necessary in their struggle for survival.

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.

Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished

Watching Icelandic men and women together is like watching toddlers. They don’t play together but in parallel; they overlap even less organically than men and women in other developed countries, which is really saying something.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank.

The best part of the article is the last paragraph which so plainly states what Iceland, and every other nation, is doing when they borrow heavily- they are trying to bring the future into the present.

 When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicon version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned. The striking thing about the future the Icelandic male briefly imported was how much it resembled the past that he celebrates. I’m betting now they’ve seen their false future the Icelandic female will have a great deal more to say about the actual one.

Overall this is a great article for anyone who wants a glimpse of the cultural as well as the technical side to Iceland's crisis.

On the net:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?currentPage=1

 

 GTB

Wall Street á túndrunni

03.02.2009

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.-    H.L. Mencken US editor (1880 - 1956)

Halfway There

I commend Ásta for apologizing for not doing her job.  Now she needs to continue what she put in motion and resign.  Although I have to admit it would make a catchy campaign slogan-

Re-elect Ásta Möller-She promises to pay attention the next time around.

 

GTB

Baðst afsökunar á mistökum

Beer Day

Today, March 1st, is Beer Day in Iceland.  This year Icelanders will be celebrating 20 years, yes, that is 20 and not 200, of legalized beer drinking in Iceland. Beer became legal way back in 1989 after a 74 year prohibition. Now if that isn't the best proof for how great the water is in Iceland then I don't know what is!

GTB