A post mortem on the Icelandic banking failures
Just yesterday, a Special Investigation Commission report was released in Iceland which criticized the handling of the country’s top three banks and the crisis that ensued when they collapsed. Seven top officials were said to have acted with "gross negligence" in allowing the collapse.
An official report yesterday accused the Icelandic government and regulators of "extreme negligence" in the run-up to the country’s 2008 banking crisis.
Geir Haarde, former prime minister, and David Oddsson, former prime minister and central bank governor, were among those blamed for the crash.
The independent "truth commission" appointed by parliament to investigate the crisis also pointed to possible illegality within the banks, including share price manipulation and exaggeration of asset values.
The 2,000-page report marks the most in-depth account to date of how one of the world’s wealthiest economies was brought to the brink of bankruptcy in October 2008 by the collapse of its three main commercial banks.
The commission criticised regulators for failing to rein in the banks – Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing – as they grew 20-fold in size between 2001 and 2008 until their liabilities far exceeded the country’s ability to bail them out.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the full report is not available in English yet (not that you’d want to read it anyway). But, I do have two documents below that the Commission did release in English.
- Iceland’s Failed Banks: A Post-Mortem
- Icelandic Deposits in Financial Institutions in Branches abroad
They are also embedded below. Enjoy.
Also see "Some Saga: On Web, Icelandic Actors Are Reading 2,000-Page Bank Crisis Report" from NPR. Apparently, some Icelanders are reading this mammoth 2,300 page report on the Internet. Maybe some Americans should do the same with the Lehman report.
Iceland’s Failed Banks: A Post-Mortem
Icelandic Deposits in Financial Institutions in Branches abroad
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