Guardian: Icesave og ábyrgðin

Blaðamaðurinn Feisal Islam skrifar um Icesave í Guardian og veltir fyrir sér hver beri ábyrgðina. Fyrirsögn greinarinnar er As Iceland resists paying our millions, let's not forget who is to blame. Svo hljóðar síðari huti hennar:

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„Icelands lax financial regulators should have stopped this, but the likes of David Oddsson, the central bank governor, believed that they had ceased to be Icelandic banks per se, and were now „north European banks, headquartered in Reykjavik“. So the strategy of adopting a British deposit base was, as he told me six months before the crisis, „a very good idea, good for both the banks, and the people putting the deposits in to these banks“.

The UK regulator, the Financial Service Authority, should have done more. In its defence, particularly with Icesave, the FSA was not the primary regulator. European law obliged the UK to take at face value the Icelandic authorities assessment of Landsbankis accounts. However, when it became apparent that the banks had unexpectedly attracted billions of pounds of internet savings, alarm bells should have rung louder. The FSA gently suggested to banks in its 2008 Financial Risk Outlook that internet savings were less „sticky“ than conventional savings. When prodded by Channel 4 News, it also advised savers to „talk to their providers“ to check if they were comfortable with different deposit protection schemes offered by foreign banks. In Icesaves case, the first £18,000 per depositor was guaranteed by an Icelandic fund. It was never paid, and this is what forms the Icesave debt. It amounts to about 40% of Icelands entire national income. By this time, however, the crash was unstoppable. A round of frenzied crisis talks between the Treasury, the Bank of England, the FSA, and the Icelandics began. Icesave began its transition from high finance to high diplomacy.

Yet there is a fundamental unanswered question about this fiasco with important implications for the future. How did Icesave amass so much UK depositors cash, so quickly? As much as £3bn flowed in its first three months, with total balances peaking above £6bn. A remarkable proportion was transferred directly from another market-leading internet savings account that had cut the rates it offered, just as Icesave launched.

In the UK especially, Icesaves strategy would not have been possible were it not for the evangelical zeal of a populist personal finance media. „Best buy“ league tables were by no means best buys. The act of offering a high interest rate was portrayed as an altruistic Viking attempt to shake up the staid British savings market, rather than a reflection of the banks desperate requirement for funding. Icesaves marketing pitch was unquestioningly and enthusiastically lapped up in the specialist press.

Ultimately, of course, a huge chunk of the blame should fall on those „rate tarts“ who chased high-interest rates without appreciating the higher risk. Certainly, those with savings above £35,000 who were discretionarily bailed out by the chancellor can count themselves as incredibly lucky. It is difficult to justify how savers lost none of their investments, ultimately at the expense of completely innocent taxpayers in Iceland and the UK. Why were they bailed out and not the depositors in BCCI? As ex-government pensions adviser Ros Altmann says: „If all bank deposits are 100% protected, but pensions and other long-term savings are at best 90% safe up to a £35,000 cap, why bother with pensions?“

The answer is that the Icelandic banks happened to collapse at the same time as half the British banking system. The Treasury calculated that the risk to financial stability of letting any British saver lose their money at that time would be too much. So the government repaid the savers, even above the deposit protection limit. It then tapped Iceland for its share, and will get the rest back from banks and an appalling burden on our hard-up building societies. Many UK building societies have had to pay out millions to fund the failure of a bank that used this same guarantee to acquire deposits at their expense.

So the pain of the Icesave folly has been shared around between Britains financial institutions, the UK taxpayer and Icelands taxpayers. An Icelandic „Nei“, if the referendum takes place, would be completely understandable. But the people of Iceland should reserve their anger for the Icelandic bankers and British savers who have dodged the pain from their doomed deal.“