Íslendingar tjá sig erlendis - tvær greinar

Ísland er undir smásjá erlendra fjölmiðla þessar vikurnar og mánuðina vegna efnahagshrunsins. Við erum sýnishorn af gjaldþrota þjóð þar sem regluverkið utanum banka og fjármál var ekkert, græðgi örfárra manna, kunningja- og klíkusamfélag auk öfgafullra, pólitískra trúarbragða og vanhæfni stjórnmálamanna og ráðgjafa þeirra leiddi þjóðina í þrot. Nú veina arkitektar og verktakar hrunsins eins og stungnir grísir ef þeir eru gagnrýndir eða missa mjúku stólana sem þeim leið svo undurvel í. Enginn þeirra hefur enn haft kjark til að horfast í augu við eigin þátt í hruninu, eigin sök á ástandinu, þótt sannanirnar glenni sig framan í þá dag eftir dag, viku eftir viku. Og enginn hefur beðið þjóðina afsökunar.

Einn hinna stungnu, veinandi grísa er Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson, prófessor og bankaráðsmaður í Seðlabankanum. Honum tókst einhvern veginn að sleppa við áminningu eftir höfundarréttardóminn en nú lítur út fyrir að hann missi þægilegan og vel launaðan bitling í Seðlabankanum þar sem hann hefur setið um árabil sem besti vinur Aðal.

Hannes Hólmsteinn hefur ekki haft sig mikið frammi upp á síðkastið eftir að trúarbrögð hans, frjálshyggjan, sigldu í strand með látum. En nú skrifaði Hannes Hólmsteinn grein. Ekki í íslenskt dagblað því hann veit að enginn hlustar á hann lengur á Íslandi. Hann skrifaði grein í Wall Street Journal og fer mikinn. Ver besta vininn með kjafti og klóm - og sjálfan sig í leiðinni - og fer afskaplega frjálslega með sögu og staðreyndir. Látið ykkur ekki bregða við fyrirsögnina og kommúnistakjaftæðið. Hannes Hólmsteinn veit sem er, að enn má ekki nefna kommúnisma á nafn í Bandaríkjunum. McCarthyisminn er lífsseigur. Lesum grein Hannesar Hólmsteins.

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FEBRUARY 2, 2009, 6:31 P.M. ET

Iceland Turns Hard Left

By HANNES H. GISSURARSON

Reykjavik, Iceland

May you live in interesting times, says an ancient Chinese curse which has now hit Iceland.

All three of Iceland's commercial banks collapsed in the beginning of October. In exchange for a $5.1 billion rescue package, the International Monetary Fund (and the European Union) forced Iceland's government to assume the banks' commitments for foreign depositors. Thus was created one of the largest public debts per capita: possibly about $10 billion for a nation of 310,000, or more than $30,000 per head.

Street riots, hitherto unheard of in this peaceful country, have now brought down the government. Rattled by protests in front of the parliament, the Social Democrats, the junior partner in a coalition with the conservatives, last week insisted that the government resign.

Besides this turmoil, both coalition leaders, conservative Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde and Social Democratic Foreign Minister Ingibjorg S. Gisladottir, were diagnosed with tumors, in Mr. Haarde's case a malignant one. Remaining calm throughout the whole episode, even when physically threatened by rioters, Mr. Haarde announced on Jan. 23 that he is retiring from politics.

On Sunday a new minority government took over, led by the Social Democrats and the Left Greens, the unrepentant heirs to the Icelandic Communist Party. The main task of the new government, led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, will be to dissolve parliament and prepare for new elections in April.

An old-fashioned Social Democrat of the Swedish ilk, with little sympathy for the business community, Ms. Sigurdardottir is seen as untainted by Iceland's financial debacle. The same applies to the Left Greens, who opposed the bank privatizations of the late 1990s. Polls suggest that the Left Greens will make huge gains in the elections and possibly become the biggest political party, thus enabling the new government to continue in power.

Its first act will be one of political vengeance: Ms. Sigurdardottir said at a press conference on the day she took office that she will try to dismiss David Oddsson, the governor of the Central Bank, who dominated Icelandic politics as conservative prime minister from 1991 to 2004.

With his sharp wit and forceful personality, Mr. Oddsson made enemies not only on the left, but also among some of Iceland's "tycoons."

In 2004, at the close of his tenure, there was a bitter conflict between him and Iceland's best-known tycoon, Jon Asgeir Johannesson, the main owner of Baugur Group, which controls more than 75% of the private media in Iceland. Worried about so much power in the hands of one man, Mr. Oddsson pushed for legislation that would have have barred any market-dominant firm from controlling more than 25% of any media company.

Although parliament passed the law, President Olafur R. Grimsson, who has close ties to Mr. Johannesson, refused to sign it. Needless to say, Mr. Johannesson has since used his media empire to conduct a relentless campaign against Mr. Oddsson. Strangely, the Icelandic left is joining forces with Mr. Johannesson against Mr. Oddsson. However, the government cannot easily dismiss the central bank governor, who is supposed to be independent.

Moreover, Mr. Oddsson is one of the few Icelanders who sounded the alarm bells before the crisis hit the island. At a breakfast meeting of the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce in November 2007 -- a year before the banking collapse -- the governor said: "Iceland is becoming uncomfortably beleaguered by foreign debt. At a time when the Icelandic government has rapidly reduced its debt and the Central Bank's foreign and domestic assets have increased dramatically, other foreign commitments [by private banks] have increased so much that the first two pale into insignificance in comparison. All can still go well, but we are surely at the outer limits of what we can sustain for the long term."

As far back as 2006, Mr. Oddsson, in several private meetings with Prime Minister Haarde, Social Democrat leader Ms. Gisladottir and Icelandic bankers, issued strenuous warnings about the banking danger.

But Mr. Oddsson could only warn, not act. In 1998, all banking supervisory activities were transferred from the Central Bank to a new Financial Supervisory Authority, which operated under the same regulations as corresponding authorities in other member states of the European Economic Area.

The left's fixation with Mr. Oddsson overlooks the two main reasons why the crisis hit Iceland harder than other countries. One was that the Icelandic banks had grown too big for Iceland and, when needed, other central banks in the EEA declined to come to the assistance of the Icelandic Central Bank to ensure bank liquidity. In retrospect, this was a serious flaw in the EEA agreement.

The crisis has now fueled speculation that Iceland may change course and try to become an EU member in order to eventually join the euro zone. But the Social Democrats, who long supported EU membership, have suddenly taken it off the agenda in order to accommodate the Left Greens, who oppose it. The conservatives, out of government for the first time in 18 years, remain ambivalent about EU membership.

Besides, it's unclear whether euro membership would have helped Iceland during this crisis. The problem is that within the euro zone, individual central banks, not the European Central Bank, remain the lenders of last resort. Iceland's Central Bank still would have been unable to keep its commercial banks afloat.

The other reason why the crisis hit Iceland so hard was that U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown used an antiterrorist law to close down Icelandic banks in Britain. The British government also put one of them, Landsbanki, together with the Icelandic ministry of finance and the central bank, on a list of terrorist organizations, alongside al Qaeda and the Talibans. This act destroyed all international confidence in the Icelandic banks, which had no chance of surviving.

With the formation of the Sigurdardottir government, Iceland has taken a sharp turn to the left. Unused to adversity, Icelanders are bewildered and angry. The new government is taking advantage of the economic collapse to go after its political enemies.

Geir H. Haarde and David Oddsson may be among the first political casualties of the international financial crisis, but they are unlikely to be the last. It looks like other nations are also entering interesting times.

Mr. Gissurarson is member of the board of Iceland's Central Bank and professor of politics at the University of Iceland.

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Íris Erlingsdóttir, sem búsett er í Bandaríkjunum og ég birti grein eftir hér var ekki sátt við einhliða málflutning og söguskoðun Hannesar Hólmsteins og birti grein í Huffington Post í gær. Íris hefur skrifað nokkrar greinar í um ástandið á Íslandi og fengið yfir sig gríðarlegar skammir Íslendinga. Hún hefur verið sökuð um að rægja land og þjóð og ýmislegt fleira óviðurkvæmilegt þrátt fyrir að segja ekkert nema sannleikann. Ætli Hannes Hólmsteinn hafi fengið viðlíka skammir fyrir sína grein og rangfærslurnar þar? En hér er grein Írisar.

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Iceland's Conservatives Try to Rewrite History

Posted February 4, 2009 | 04:49 PM (EST)

by Íris Erlingsdóttir

Hannes H. Gissurarson wrote a letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal decrying the new government's desire to remove former conservative Independence Party Prime Minister David Oddsson from his position as governor of the Central Bank.

Although Mr. Gissurarson sees this development as part of a left-wing conspiracy to lead Iceland down the path of damnation, the truth of the matter is that Oddsson and Hannes were the main architects of Iceland's banks' privatization and chief apostles of the lax regulatory system that resulted in the worst financial failure of any country in modern times.

In 2002, Mr. Gissurarson published How Can Iceland Become the Richest Country in the World?, in which he outlined the opportunities that Iceland would have as an international financial center. Oddsson believed that it was the government's ownership of the banks that was preventing this from happening. "The crucial factor," he said in a 2004 speech, "was the iron grip that the Icelandic state had on all business activity through its ownership of the commercial banks."

Accordingly, the country's banks were privatized in 2003. However, in keeping with their libertarian philosophy, no effective regulatory and supervisory bodies were created. Instead, Iceland's political patronage system decided who was going to own the banks and what their reporting requirements would be.

Mr. Gissurarson is himself one of the prime beneficiaries of this patronage system. He was appointed to the political science faculty of the University of Iceland in 1988 by Iceland's Education Minister, despite vociferous protests from the faculty and the university that he had no expertise in the area of politics. He was appointed to the Central Bank's board, despite his lack of expertise in finance. He was recently found by the Icelandic Supreme Court to have breached the copyright in the memoirs of Halldor Laxness, Iceland's only Nobel Prize winner.

The Central Bank was instrumental in Iceland's rise. It maintained high interest rates, which led to an overvalued krona, which led to cheap imported goods and vast sums of foreign capital. In 2006, when Danske Bank published a paper titled "Geyser Crisis" that indicated that Iceland's banks had grown too much, and that the country was overly dependent on foreign investors to keep sending money.

When the banks were unable to repay bonds in euros, as predicted, the house of cards collapsed. Glitnir, Iceland's third largest bank, approached Oddsson in late September 2008 for the euros it desperately needed to maintain liquidity. Oddsson led Glitnir to believe that he had them covered, but in fact he had not stockpiled enough foreign currency reserves to back more than 4% of the banks' foreign debts. Ultimately, he informed Glitnir officials that the bank would be nationalized, which rapidly led to bank runs in Europe, the collapse of all three of Iceland's large commercial banks, and a precipitous decline of the krona.

Mr. Gissurarson attempts to place the blame for Iceland's fall on everyone but Mr. Oddsson and himself. He ignores the facts that Mr. Oddsson maintained control of the Independence Party after he took his post with the Central Bank, that the deregulation of the banks went according to the plan that he and Oddsson had drafted years earlier, and that England seized Iceland's banks only after the Icelandic government notified British authorities that it would not back its banks' foreign accounts.

Another Chinese curse is "May your dreams all come true." Your dreams did come true, Mr. Gissurarson, and our country has been cursed.

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Slóð á grein Hannesar Hólmsteins er hér og slóð á grein Írisar hér.

Athugasemdir

[Sigrún Jónsdóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 00:49]

Það er undarlegt að það skuli vera prófessor í stjórnmælafræði sem skrifar þessa greiningu.  Svo kennir hann framtíðar stjórnmálafræðingum.

Gott að hafa Írisi til að svara svona bulli á þessum vettvangi.

[Jóna Kolbrún Garðarsdóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 01:22]

Svargreinin hjá Írisi er góð, og trúverðug.  Ég las grein Hannesar í gær, og fannst mér hann bulla helst til mikið

[Jóna Kolbrún Garðarsdóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 01:33]

With his sharp wit and forceful personality, Mr. Oddsson made enemies not only on the left, but also among some of Iceland's "tycoons."  Þessi málsgrein Hannesar fór sérstaklega í taugarnar á mér.   Og þetta " Street riots, hitherto unheard of in this peaceful country, have now brought down the government. Rattled by protests in front of the parliament, " 

[Gunnar Th. Gunnarsson, 5.2.2009 kl. 03:24]

Grein Hannesar er góð.

Margir þeirra sem gagnrýna einkavæðingu bankanna, gera það á alröngum forsendum. Vissulega og greinilega voru gerð mistök en ekki með því að selja ríkisbankanna. Þeir einu sem því halda fram eru V-grænir og hugsanlega systurflokkar þeirra í öðrum löndum. Það fólk sem hugsar á þeim nótum er algerlega einangrað með þessa skoðun. Pólitísk einangrun er nokkuð sem fáeinar þjóðir þekkja vel í gegnum kommúnistastjórnir sínar.

[Jenný Stefanía Jensdóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 03:57]

But Mr. Oddsson could only warn, not act.  REGINVITLEYSA OG RUGL.

The new government is taking advantage of the economic collapse to go after its political enemies. Einmitt það! og hver bar ábyrgð á collapsinu Mr Gissurarson?

Greinin er góð í sögulegu tilliti, búið að fastsetja á prent og í myndmáli sporbautinn helbláa sem þeir keyrðu eftir.  Rannsóknarefni komandi kynslóða!

Íris er náttúrulega íslensk hetja, sem ég og aðrir Íslendingar megum vera stolt af.

[Hjálmtýr V Heiðdal, 5.2.2009 kl. 08:30]

Það er kanski ráð að þýða hið fræga viðtal við Hannes sem birtist á Stöð 2 ári fyrir hrunið.

Hér er smá úrdráttur:

„Hugsið ykkur, bankakerfið hefur á milli sjö og tífaldast á svona, þessum fjórum fimm árum. Og hugsið ykkur hvað það væri nú gaman ef við bara héldum áfram og gæfum í. Þannig að fyrst kemur kvótakerfið svo kemur lagfæringin á ríkisbúskapnum, svo kemur einkavæðing bankanna og útrásin. Og ef við gætum svo farið að selja þekkingu til útlanda, það væri alveg frábært.“

[Arnór Valdimarsson (IP-tala skráð) 5.2.2009 kl. 10:33]

Hannes er bulludallur. Og ætti að skammast sín fyrir að bera út svona rangfærslur um Íslendinga erlendis.

 ''With the formation of the Sigurdardottir government, Iceland has taken a sharp turn to the left. Unused to adversity, Icelanders are bewildered and angry. The new government is taking advantage of the economic collapse to go after its political enemies.

Geir H. Haarde and David Oddsson may be among the first political casualties of the international financial crisis,''

Það veit öll þjóðin að þetta eru höfuðpaurarnir í að koma okkur í krísurnar. 

Og það veit öll þjóðin að þeir klikkuðu manna mest, þó við stjórnvölinn væru, að forða okkur frá henni. 

Og að lokum klikkuðu þeir algjörlega á að koma með lausnir eftir fall bankana. Og voru upp fyrir haus í að kóa með spillingunni. Gerðu ekkert til að efla fjármálaeftirlitið, og ekkert til að efla efnahagsbrotadeildina sem dæmi.

Nei, þetta er ekki pólitísk hefnd. Þetta er vilji þjóðarinnar.

[Helga Magnúsdóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 10:58]

Það er eiginlega búið að segja allt sem ég hefði viljað sagt hafa. Takk fyrir mig.

[Arinbjörn Kúld, 5.2.2009 kl. 11:18]

Hugguleg og sæt mynd þarna af DO og HHG. Næstum eins og par. Það skyldi þó aldrei vera að ........................................................?

[Rut Sumarliðadóttir, 5.2.2009 kl. 11:41]

Það er nefnilega það. Eins gott að hafa eina og eina Írisi til að balansera bullið í Hannesi. Er hann ekki bara skotin í Dodda? Nei, segi nú svona.

[Hlédís, 5.2.2009 kl. 16:47]

í athugasemd nr 4 HRÓSAR "sjálfstæðis"-flokkskjósandi.  komma-grýlu-sjálfsvörn og rangfærslum HHG.

Svona hundstryggð við "sterkasta flokkinn" skelfir undirritaða. Alltaf kosið yfir sig lið sem reyndari hluti kjósendanna VEIT að hyglir eingöngu sínum útvöldu á kostnað allra annarra.  

[Gunnar Th. Gunnarsson, 5.2.2009 kl. 18:11]

Rangt Hlédís. Þeir hygla þeim sem hæfastir eru. Að þeir komi flestir af hægri væng stjórnmálanna er ekki Sjálfstæðisflokknum að kenna.

[Hlédís, 5.2.2009 kl. 18:18]

Er nokkuð, nokkurntíma sök þess flokks?  Hægri vængur leiðir hugann að hægra brjóstinu Flokksins - sem aðeins mjólkar gæðingunum.

Ég þrefa ekki meir um þetta. It stinks!

[Víðir Benediktsson, 5.2.2009 kl. 21:46]

Sjálfsstæðisflokkurinn gerði bara tæknileg mistök. Það er þekkt fyrirbæri innan flokksins og yfirleitt fljótt fyrirgefið. Segji ekki það sem mig langar til að segja um frjálshyggjufasistann títtnefnda. Hef ekki efni á að verja mig fyrir dómstólum þar sem frændur og afkomendur Davíðs ráða ríkjum. Á trúlega engan séns heldur. "Vont er þeirra ranglæti en verra er þeirra réttlæti" Er þetta ekki annars haft eftir Hannesi? Bara spyr svo ég verði ekki sakaður um ritstuld.