Iceland Proves Ireland Did ‘Wrong Things’ Sacrificing Taxpayers

From Bloomberg

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- On his second day as head of Iceland’s third-largest bank, Arni Tomasson faced a crisis: The firm he had been asked by regulators to run was out of cash.

It was Oct. 8, 2008, at the height of the global financial meltdown, and Iceland’s bank assets in the U.K. had been frozen, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue. Customers flocked to branches of Tomasson’s Glitnir Banki hf to withdraw money, even though the government had guaranteed their deposits. By the end of the day, the vaults were empty, says Tomasson, recalling the drama two years later.

The only way Glitnir and other lenders could avoid a panic the next morning was to get more cash, which they were having trouble doing. A container of crisp kronur sat on the tarmac at Reykjavik’s airport awaiting payment, Tomasson says. The British company that printed the bills, De La Rue Plc, was demanding sterling, and the central bank couldn’t access its U.K. account.

“Everybody was panicked -- depositors, creditors, banks around the world,” Tomasson says. “The effort by all of us at the time was to make sure life could go on as normal.”

Tomasson, 55, got the cash he needed that night after the central bank managed to open an emergency line of credit with a European lender. Now, he’s sitting in an office in Reykjavik, handling about $24 billion of claims by creditors as life in Iceland’s capital returns to normal.

Unlike other nations, including the U.S. and Ireland, which injected billions of dollars of capital into their financial institutions to keep them afloat, Iceland placed its biggest lenders in receivership. It chose not to protect creditors of the country’s banks, whose assets had ballooned to $209 billion, 11 times gross domestic product.

Krona Devaluation

The crisis almost sank the country. The krona lost 58 percent of its value by the end of November 2008, inflation spiked to 19 percent in January 2009 and GDP contracted by 7 percent that year. Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde resigned after nationwide protests. With the economy projected to grow 3 percent this year, Iceland’s decision to let the banks fail is looking smart -- and may prove to be a model for others...

After BofA Escalates, Refuses To Process Wikileaks' Payments, Wiki Retaliates, Advises Americans To Put Their Money "Somewhere Safer"

From Zerohedge.

Bank of America just fired the preemptive escalation shot in its duel with Wikileaks. Late on Friday, America's biggest mortgage lender, and the firm that is now getting sued left and right for various mortgage transgressions, announced it is joining MasterCard, Paypal and Visa in ceasing transactions for Wikileaks. While this decision will certainly not improve Operation Anonymous' empathy toward the North Carolina bank, it may just precipitate overt retaliation by Assange, who is now rumored to be in possession of data that could provie harmful to BAC. Which is why this sudden escalation out of left field by the bank strikes as surprisingly odd: BofA's upside is very limited while its downside could be 100% - even if Wikileaks is bluffing, why provoke them. And as expected, Wikileaks has already retaliated: in two sequential tweets it advised its 568,117 (and very rapidly growing) subscribers to pull their money out of Bank of America, and also to close all their accounts with the firm, urging them to put their money "somewhere safer." ...


Read more.

Pan-European Bank Run Day Starts With A Bang: Bank Of Ireland ATM Systems Fail

From Zerohedge.

As a reminder today is the day when Europeans are supposed to withdraw money from their bank, not necessarily in a beneficial manner. And maybe the action is already having an impact with the Bank of Ireland apparently the first casualty. BBC reports: "Customers of one of Ireland's largest banks have been unable to access their cash accounts through ATMs or online. The Bank of Ireland said it became aware at 1000 GMT on Tuesday that ATMs were not working and customers were unable to make online transactions. A spokesperson said the fault lay with the bank's internal system and engineers were working to restore normal services." And by bank's internal system presumably one meant lack of money...Perhaps Eric Cantona will have the last laugh after all...

Keiser Report №101: Markets! Finance! Scandal!

From MaxKeiser.com