Tvær athyglisverðar greinar birtast um Ísland í bresku pressunni í dag. Önnur er eftir Roger Boyes, höfund Meltdown Iceland, sem var gestur í Silfri Egils stuttu fyrir jól. Hún birtist í The Times, en Boyes er fréttaritari þess blaðs.

Þar segir meðal annars:

„Iceland may seem to outsiders to be at war with the world, stubbornly refusing to help to clean up the messy aftermath of its financial crisis.

In fact, as President Grimsson’s veto has demonstrated, the island nation is at war with itself; unsure where responsibility for near-bankruptcy lies. Its confusion over the issue is rapidly making a community of 300,000 ungoverneable. How much sovereignty should it surrender to foreigners, to the European Union, or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to which it has turned for financial help? How far has any country mired in debt already surrendered chunks of its political independence?“

Hin greinin er eftir John Kay, sem er heimsfrægur hagfræðingur, höfundur bókar sem nefnist The Truth about Markets. Hann var reyndar gestur í Silfrinu árið 2004 ef ég man rétt. Kay skrifar í Financial Times undir yfirskriftinni The cause of our crises has not gone away:

„The citizens of that most placid of countries, Iceland, now backed by their president, have found a characteristically polite and restrained way of disputing an obligation to stump up large sums of cash to pay for the arrogance and greed of other people. They are right. We should listen to them before the same message is conveyed in much more violent form, in another place and at another time. But it seems unlikely that we will.

We made a mistake in the closing decades of the 20th century. We removed restrictions that had imposed functional separation on financial institutions. This led to businesses riddled with conflicts of interest and culture, controlled by warring groups of their own senior employees. The scale of resources such businesses commanded enabled them to wield influence to create a – for them – virtuous circle of growing economic and political power. That mistake will not be easily remedied, and that is why I view the new decade with great apprehension. In the name of free markets, we created a monster that threatens to destroy the very free markets we extol.„