Leiðari stórblaðsins Financial Times í dag er merkilegur. Hann ber yfirskriftina Do not put Iceland into a debtor’s prison. Það þarf ekki að fjölyrða um hvílík áhrif þetta blað hefur.
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Do not put Iceland in a debtors’ prison
Published: January 6 2010 19:49 | Last updated: January 6 2010 19:49
Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, Iceland’s president, this week rejected
a law settling his country’s dispute with the UK and the Netherlands over
the sorry Icesave affair. In truth he had little choice: a quarter of this
fiercely independent electorate signed a petition against it, a show of
defiance no leader can ignore.
The law will now go to a referendum, likely to vote it down.
This may teach Dutch and British leaders the limits of what can be achieved
with duress, but too late to do anyone much good.
Landsbanki offered the Icesave accounts under European
“passporting” rules, which let banks open branches abroad if they satisfy
the home country’s regulators and take part in its deposit guarantee scheme.
But as its October 2008 collapse showed, Landsbanki was exposed far beyond
what Iceland’s deposit guarantee fund could pay.
In June, the UK and the Netherlands agreed a 15-year loan to the
guarantee fund to reimburse their Icesave depositors, but demanded an
Icelandic government guarantee for the loan, which would leave taxpayers on
the hook for more than one-third of Iceland’s yearly output. (The amount
actually paid would be less, depending on what can be recovered from
Landsbanki assets). Icelandic legislators passed it only after limiting the
guarantee to a share of economic growth over the life of the loan. When
British and Dutch authorities balked at the guarantee possibly expiring with
the debt still unpaid, changes were passed that were acceptable to the
creditors – but not to Mr Grimsson or to most Icelanders.
It is hard to fathom the need to make an example of Iceland. For
the creditors, the loans are trivial: they sum to €3.9bn, one-hundredth of
what the UK alone will borrow this year and next. Neighbourly generosity
would cost Amsterdam and London next to nothing.
They are also not innocent victims. British and Dutch banks
benefited greatly from the rules. Had they failed on the same scale, it is
delusional to think their governments would take on hundreds of billions in
debt to rescue foreign savers, and odious to force a weak neighbour to do
the equivalent.
From the start, Iceland has been under the gun. Loans from
Poland, Nordic neighbours and the IMF depend on successful IMF reviews that
in turn hinge on an Icesave solution. A lifeline-grasping application for EU
membership is hostage to British and Dutch goodwill.
Landsbanki showed that Europe must reform its rules to achieve
stronger common standards. This will not be done by putting Iceland in a
debtors’ prison.
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Hér er svo viðtal hins fræga sjónvarpsmanns Jeremys Paxman við Ólaf Ragnar Grímsson. Það má fagna því að loks sé einhver kominn í erlenda fjölmiðla til að skýra sjónarmið Íslendinga. Hefði kannski þurft að gera aðeins fyrr, en samt, maður spyr hvort við séum að upplifa viðhorfsbreytingu í þessu máli. Kannski aldrei of seint.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTP3DH5YQhc]
