Willem Buiter skrifar um heimsókn sína til Íslands og lærdóma sem hann dregur af henni fyrir Bretland.
Segir meðal annars að íslenska ríkið hefði ekki getað bjargað bönkunum vegna stærðar þeirra, að Ísland sé sokkið í skuldafen en enginn viti þó umfang skuldanna, hann hefur ekki mikla trú á erlendum eignum Kaupþings og Landsbankans sem eiga að koma á móti skuldunum.
Buiter segir ennfremur að eftirlit með bönkum hafi verið hlægilega lélegt, það hafi verið mikil mistök að leyfa svo hátt gengi gjaldmiðilsins og að þær afsakanir ráðamanna að vandinn komi að utan séu út í hött.
As if! segir hann.
Glætan!
Buiter leggur síðan fram hugmyndir í lok greinarinnar sem fela meðal annars í sér að breska stjórnin taki yfir alla viðskiptabanka landsins.
„Iceland’s government had to let the country’s three main banks go into administration because it did not have the fiscal capacity to bail out financial institutions with balance sheets amounting to 600-700 per cent of annual GDP. Any attempt to commit further government resources to the rescue of the banking system would have precipitated a sovereign default.
With each day that passes, estimates of the recovery value of the assets of the three ‘bad banks’ melts away like snow in April. The decision not to guarantee the liabilities or the assets of the banks (other than retail deposits, including retail deposits with foreign branches for amounts up to €20,000) was the only wise thing the Icelandic authorities have done in this whole sorry mess. It isn’t even clear that the Icelandic authorities came up with this sensible idea themselves. More likely the IMF opened their eyes. The creditors of the banks, which include Commerzbank and Bayerische Landesbank will have to explain to their own shareholders and taxpayers why they now in effect own large chunks of three defunct Icelandic banks.“
Og:
„Both countries pay the price for the hubris of policymakers who believed that they had engineered the end of boom and bust and replaced it with perpetual boom. The risks associated with asset market and credit booms and bubbles were dismissed (”how can you be sure it is a bubble? Do you know better than the market etc.”). In neither country have the responsible parties (the prime minister, the minister of finance, the governor of the central bank and the head of banking regulation and supervision) admitted any personal responsibility for the disaster. Instead we are told tales of a once-in-a-lifetime calamity, coming at us from abroad, that ruined a perfectly sensible and sustainable set of domestic policies, regulations, rules and arrangements. As if!
Both countries allowed the unbridled growth of banks that became too large to fail. In the case of Iceland, the banks also became too large to rescue. In the UK, the jury is still out on the ‘too large to rescue’ issue, but I have serious and growing concerns.“
Greinin er í heild sinni hér.
