Orðspor þjóðar

Maður nær kannski ekki að hugleiða það mikið mitt í hruninu hér heima.

En kannski er eitt af því alvarlegasta að orðspor Íslands er skaddað um langa framtíð.

Myndin sem er dregin upp í þessari grein í hinu víðlesna tímariti Vanity Fair er ekki ýkja fögur. Hættan er að við séum að verða eins konar alþjóðlegur samnefnari fyrir fjármálarugl– í greininni er beinlínis talað um mesta brjálæði fjármálasögunnar. (Í frétt Ríkisútvarpsins um fjárglæfrafélagið Milestone má lesa hið sama, Íslendingar mæta hvarvetna tortryggni í útlöndum.)

Þetta er ein af ástæðunum fyrir því að nauðsynlegt er að hreinsa vel til eftir partíið. Hróður okkar veltur á því.

Hér eru þrjú brot úr greininni:

„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. Icelands president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies. “Our heritage and training, our culture and home market, have provided a valuable advantage,” he said, then went on to list nine of these advantages, ending with how unthreatening to others Icelanders are. (“Some people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm.”) There were many, many expressions of this same sentiment, most of them in Icelandic. “There were research projects at the university to explain why the Icelandic business model was superior,” says Gylfi Zoega, chairman of the economics department. “It was all about our informal channels of communication and ability to make quick decisions and so forth.”

“We were always told that the Icelandic businessmen were so clever,” says university finance professor and former banker Vilhjalmur Bjarnason. “They were very quick. And when they bought something they did it very quickly. Why was that? That is usually because the seller is very satisfied with the price.”

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„What he might say to them about their collapse is an open question. Theres a charming lack of financial experience in Icelandic financial-policymaking circles. The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet. Haarde, though, is a trained economist-just not a very good one. The economics department at the University of Iceland has him pegged as a B-minus student. As a group, the Independence Partys leaders have a reputation for not knowing much about finance and for refusing to avail themselves of experts who do. An Icelandic professor at the London School of Economics named Jon Danielsson, who specializes in financial panics, has had his offer to help spurned; so have several well-known financial economists at the University of Iceland. Even the advice of really smart central bankers from seriously big countries went ignored. Its not hard to see why the Independence Party and its prime minister fail to appeal to Icelandic women: they are the guy driving his family around in search of some familiar landmark and refusing, over his wifes complaints, to stop and ask directions.

“Why is Vanity Fair interested in Iceland?” he asks as he strides into the room, with the force and authority of the leader of a much larger nation. And its a good question.

As it turns out, hes not actually stupid, but political leaders seldom are, no matter how much the people who elected them insist that it must be so. He does indeed say things that could not possibly be true, but they are only the sorts of fibs that prime ministers are hired to tell. He claims that the krona is once again an essentially stable currency, for instance, when the truth is it doesnt currently trade in international markets-it is assigned an arbitrary value by the government for select purposes. Icelanders abroad have already figured out not to use their Visa cards, for fear of being charged the real exchange rate, whatever that might be.

The prime minister would like me to believe that he saw Icelands financial crisis taking shape but could do little about it. (“We could not say publicly our fears about the banks, because you create the very thing you are seeking to avoid: a panic.”) By implication it was not politicians like him but financiers who were to blame. On some level the people agree: the guy who ran the Baugur investment group had snowballs chucked at him as he dashed from the 101 Hotel, which his wife owns, to his limo; the guy who ran Kaupthing Bank turned up at the National Theater and, as he took his seat, was booed. But, for the most part, the big shots have fled Iceland for London, or are lying low, leaving the poor prime minister to shoulder the blame and face the angry demonstrators, led by folksinging activist Hordur Torfason, who assemble every weekend outside Parliament. Haarde has his story, and hes sticking to it: foreigners entrusted their capital to Iceland, and Iceland put it to good use, but then, last September 15, Lehman Brothers failed and foreigners panicked and demanded their capital back. Iceland was ruined not by its own recklessness but by a global tsunami. The problem with this story is that it fails to explain why the tsunami struck Iceland, as opposed to, say, Tonga.

But I didnt come to Iceland to argue. I came to understand. “Theres something I really want to ask you,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Is it true that youve been telling people that its time to stop banking and go fishing?”

A great line, I thought. Succinct, true, and to the point. But Id heard about it thirdhand, from a New York hedge-fund manager. The prime minister fixes me with a self-consciously stern gaze. “Thats a gross exaggeration,” he says.

“I thought it made sense,” I say uneasily.

“I never said that!”

Obviously, Ive hit some kind of nerve, but which kind I cannot tell. Is he worried that to have said such a thing would make him seem a fool? Or does he still think that fishing, as a profession, is somehow less dignified than banking?“

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“One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem. Plus, most of the people who could credibly charge Iceland-or, for that matter, Lehman Brothers-with financial crimes could be dismissed as crass profiteers, talking their own book. Back in April 2006, however, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Chicago named Bob Aliber took an interest in Iceland. Aliber found himself at the London Business School, listening to a talk on Iceland, about which he knew nothing. He recognized instantly the signs. Digging into the data, he found in Iceland the outlines of what was so clearly a historic act of financial madness that it belonged in a textbook. “The Perfect Bubble,” Aliber calls Icelands financial rise, and he has the textbook in the works: an updated version of Charles Kindlebergers 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, a new edition of which hes currently editing. In it, Iceland, he decided back in 2006, would now have its own little box, along with the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip Craze-even though Iceland had yet to crash. For him the actual crash was a mere formality.”