2008-10-14

airiefairie: (cap)
2008-10-14 12:16 am
Entry tags:

The debt soup




The new Icelandic national food is called Skuldasúpa.

Skuldasúpa translates like Soup of Debt. So you cannot throw in any healthy ingredients. It does not look like Icelandic Kronas on a bed of salad either. The krona tastes too bad but it can be used as toilet paper, it is actually a very good idea. Selling kronas as toilet paper would give me more € than if I would try to change them into € at the money exchange!

Our Krona is worth more as toilet paper than as a currency! :S

What you can put in the soup is our worthless currency, our bankers and businessmen that reach as far as they can because of vague or non-existent legislation... the parliament that did not make any viable rules (even they had several years) and encouraged the bankers and businessmen in continuing their "good job"... the institutes that were supposed to monitor the banks and make sure there was enough backup foreign currencies but did not... and last and not least our central bank managers plus all the politicians, both local and foreign that with their thoughtless comments and actions killed the last big bank in Iceland and our best chance of getting decently out of the crisis.

The government had just started to try to save the bank when our head bank manager (of the central bank) said "we (don't know who those "we" are) will not pay foreign debts for disorderly people". On the next day politicians in UK said "Believe it or not they are not going to pay", then took action against all Icelandic banks in England, not only the one that was already doomed. This caused panic and after a few hours the bank had collapsed even if the future looked rather good for it the day before.

So now I have explained the ingredients and you know how this soup looks like. Feel free to throw in some ingredients of your own choice but be warned that this soup is foul tasting and can never fill you up. In fact the soup is constantly hungry for your money so the best advice I can give you all is never to collect debt and don't let your politicians and "clever" businessmen do that to your countries.

By the way the strongest indication about how serious things are is that the Polish people that have been working in Iceland and sending money home have been forced to move back home because of the weak krona. If you come from abroad it is the other way around: you have serious spending power if you exchange $, € or any strong currency into kronas and spend the money there.

Things will first get worse before they become better. I hope our politicians and bankers will finally draw a lesson from all of this... but also the Icelandic people who have become too lazy, arrogant and self-sufficient and thus neglected their citizen's duties and did not supervise their rulers.