A meeting of the board of the International Monetary fund (IMF) on the subject of Iceland’s loan request is scheduled today.
The meeting in Washington DC will go ahead at 15.00, which is 20.00 GMT in Reykjavik and London. The board’s decision on the loan application is expected before midnight GMT, if the meeting goes as planned.
The general opinion is that the IMF probably will approve Iceland’s application for a USD 2.1 billion loan, which is approximately ISK 290 billion.
Subject to the loan’s approval, a consortium of countries, including the Nordic states, Poland, the Faroe Islands, and probably Russia and the European Union, have expressed a willingness to lend Iceland a further USD 3 billion, equal to ISK 420 billion.
IceNews will provide further information as it becomes available.
There you have it. The world is now paying so that lazy Icelanders can spend Christmas in New York and buy more Mercedes cars….
I used to think that Italy was bad until I heard about Iceland. At least, we never pretended we were an advanced country.
Aleassandro go to eat spaghetties!!!
Icelanders people are not lazy at all.
Hungary, Ukraine, Pakistan, etc got IMF money quickly. I guess the IMF does not think Iceland is sincere about making an effort to pay the money back.
Martin icelanders are lazy and racists. And Aleasandro is right.And he is lucky because Italy has spaguettis to eat. We will see what is gonna happen here.Because all of you need our money and food, don´t you????
Icelanders are very hard-working.
A friend of mine has worked very hard to build up his business, and now it looks as if he might lose everything because of the collapse of the banking system and the economy, along with around two-thirds of the population of Iceland if his guess is correct.
I hope the government scheme to keep people in their homes when they can’t pay the mortgage is successful, but in view of their handling of affairs so far, that might be unduly optimistic of me.
Aleassandro, definatley Italian don’t know which side to be on. You cant blame everyone in Iceland for the dirty deeds of a few. Look at your history books musalini? The people of Iceland work extremely hard and would rather drive a land cruiser than an Italian Vespa you knob. españa. An even bigger knob. Icelanders are certainly not racist looking at your name then Spain comes to mind and Lewis Hamilton now who´s racist?
Icelanders are not lazy at all, is the mistake of few now we all have to pay the consequences.we all pray the meting will be successful to wipe our tears. We will correct our mistake. GOD BLESS ICELAND!
Sorry, I typed my name wrong. It’s Alessandro and I’m Italian.
I never said Icelanders were racists. I said they are lazy, speculators, living on debt and on top of that they want the rest of the world to pay for their extravagances.
I would also like to boast my country is supposedly the best place to live on earth. Icelanders managed to fool everyone for almost a decade and are now paying the price.
Iceland produces nothing useful to the world, with a few exceptions in fishery, and needs to import capital in order to sustain its Ponzi-scheme economy.
The bubble burst and they are now coming back to reality. They have nobody to blame but themselves if they bought BMW’s taking debts in euros, yens or swiss francs or traveled to New York every month for shopping holidays.
You know, people in Italy were starving 100 years ago. What did they do? They immigrated to the US, worked hard and built businesses there. They didn’t have the IMF to give them money to spend on Armani clothes…
You will obviously start insulting Italy. Without the smallest doubt, Italy is far from perfect, very far indeed. Nevertheless, we never pretended we were the best country of the world. Stop whining and start working for a change.
“You know, people in Italy were starving 100 years ago. What did they do? They immigrated to the US, worked hard and built one of the most brutal crime empires known to man.” Isn’t it this you meant? sorry for correcting you Alessandro :D
Again same history: italian, spanish, icelander, english … agggggg ! I hate this, again same history! Stopppp !
- Aleassandro, envy is not good, take care of your life!
- España, lazy and racists the Icelanders ???? You are joking !!!
- Icelanders are very hard-working. Most important, they are VERY honest; for that reason they have done: absolute NOTHING -> a whole: piece of sterile, they have made rich and futurist country.
- Steve, italian Vespa? : history of the country. Also: Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Bizzarrini, De Tomaso, ISO, Pagani, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, … Stoppppp !!
“You cant blame everyone in Iceland for the dirty deeds of a few. Look at your history books musalini?”
Lewis Hamilton: few spanish racists only !!
Knob? Year 1980, we were NOTHING. Dictatorship: 1939-1976. Today, 8th richer country in the world: today, our GDP is higher than the canadian one. Why Canada is in the G7, 7th chair? It is our chair, 2006-2007-2008 ! Rare things of the english men!! USA, UK, Canadian…
A country of lazy people is not the 8th richer country in the world, and only 25 years!!
Alessandro, don’t bother.
Mostly people debating here have no experience of life in Iceland. They visited or know a friend, but when it comes to know really the culture of Icelanders they don’t have a clue. Indeed, is very different to have a chat around a drink than spending some of your life in a different culture.
Rare is the Icelander, beside few good ones, who come to this site to debate without all the pride and most importantly the ignorance of their own situation and past situation.
Debating it is important. Getting out what you have in your chest, by writing helps to feel better. But when it comes to hate and superiority, I don’t think that helps to a constructive debate.
Well I really wonder why people have to insult others to try and make their point (so by mister Italian way of thinking says the USA is lazy too ) how can you say every person in Iceland is lazy? Just shows that some people just don’t know what they are talking about. There is no pretending in Iceland, these are real people who are losing their jobs and homes not some story and its not just here it happening all over the world. Instead of insulting we should all be praying and trying to help in what ever little way we can to build up people not bring them down. Iceland is a beautiful place and the people are some of the must friendly and warmest in the world. Oh before you say I’m just an Icelandic person I’m not I am from Canada but living here in Iceland. I guess now Canada is going to get insulted. God bless Iceland and Italy.
We are so lazy here there has been negative unemployment here for years, we had to import pepole to work here beacuse of lack of manpower
unemplyment is usually less than 1%
you need to learn more about Iceland
Don Alessandro :) i like Italy, i not going to say anything negtive about a whole country just beacuse you are wrong, that would be silly
Obviously, whatever criteria model that was used to declare Iceland as being a rich country was as similarly faulty as the models used to calculate macro economic risk.
I think the dogs in the street, (i.e. if there were dogs in the street) would have considered with some weight that consumer spending and property purchases based on high ratio of loans to income, was not real wealth.
More like an added burden, an indexed expanding burden :)
Mike Smith said:
“I hope the government scheme to keep people in their homes when they can’t pay the mortgage is successful, but in view of their handling of affairs so far, that might be unduly optimistic of me.”
The scheme looks very tame. Unfortunately, housing at an affordable price is not a civil right but has become thee outstanding financial burden, a debt way beyond the real value of 4 walls and a few partitions. A debt which grew with the rise in property prices, which grew and grew as finance became more and more available.
Iceland would (just) be experiencing a severe recession based on that alone, if it were not for the added foreign banking catastrophe.
The property loans are index linked to inflation. All this government scheme proposes is to defer some part of the off payments. The capital plus the deferred payment will still grow enormously. Even a house owner over the last 6 months who has been paying ordinarily 5% interest plus 5% inflation plus the off payment on the capital, has still seen the value of the total loan debt rise by at least 10%..
If you had some savings at this present time, the best thing you could do is use a decent portion of them to pay off your mortgage.
If you have different loans, chose the older loans first.
If you have 4 different loans as many do have, spread your savings equally over the 4 loans, reducing each loan by equal proportion. There will be a substantial reduction in mortgage repayment
.
It seems like Iceland now replaced the USA as the most hated country in the world. Let’s get Obama to Iceland to save us all and the world. Our savior.
to every body who think they know something about Icelanders
Icelanders are hardest working poeple in the world they are not racist, how do i know, i lived there for 20 years, go eat your pasta and get your negitive heads out your were the sun dont shine
i would rather become icelandic than i little guy from pasta land
@Alessandro:
I’m not Icelandic but I’m married to one and I live in Iceland.
1) Icelanders can be named a lot of things but lazy is surely not an adjective that could qualify them.
2) As for “living on debt”… do you honestly know many people who don’t take loans to purchase a house or even new car? You still have to put a roof over your head and be able to drive to work or going grocery shopping. I would agree that they didn’t have to go for the latest and fanciest car. As the interest rate in Iceland was very high people were offered to get a foreign currency loans by the bank and now with the devaluation of krona these same people have problems making ends meet.
3) “… New York every month for shopping holidays…” Come on, get real!!! I can bet you that you would hardly find a handful of people who did so. In Iceland we still don’t have advertisements like in the UK about “consolidating your repayments to be able to afford those holidays you always dreamed of”.
All your argumentation is biased by the fact that you are putting all Icelanders in the same backet when in fact only a few are to blame and other are just collateral victims.
theresa–’It seems like Iceland now replaced the USA as the most hated country in the world’–teresa, Israel, the home of ‘big guy’ is by far the most hated country on earth, sadly, because HE will save us, for sure, in the end, if we pray and blah blah….
It is quite normal, unfortunately that those of you who do not know Icelanders and Icelandic culture through day to day contact should be prey to the negative propaganda the British government and medias carried on for 8 weeks now. Darling and Brown had a tremendous interest in justifying the application of the anti-terrorist act on Icelandic assets: they were loosing their voters!And to justify the anti-terrorist act, they had to spread the idea that Icelanders were a nation of bad people who would not keep their word. So, Darling and Brown became heroes, got their popularity back and leave you filled with hatred. Are you going to let them rule over you souls or…. come and see us?
Icelanders are not lazy, they are just not very good at planning (luckily there are 2-3 exceptions). And they are VERY racist. I couldn’t believe my ears. They only talk in Icelandic with people who are not too dark (offcourse there are some exceptions).
Most people have to take loans to buy a house. But to borrow money for purchasing a 42″ TV, car and other luxuries are madness. I don’t know a single person (except of in Iceland), that have borrowed money to buy a car. Most of them don’t have very fancy cars, but still. A 10 year old car is perfectly fine. I don’t understand this overloaning just to have all the newest and best. Icelanders love to show-off, which is okay, but at least save a few years before you buy that ultra-super-fancy car you really want.
It does not seem like Icelanders know how to save though…
It was pretty sad that Iceland now are granted the 5 billion loan, because they will never learn. History will repeat itself over and over again.
Why does Icelanders always think that loans can fix anything????
Before all the hating are sent to me, I must say that there are some lovely Icelanders. And Iceland is a amazing and beautiful country.
Hugs from one who used to live there
first of all i’d like to express my sympathy with the islandic people. since i know much more about iceland than before october i believe that your future can be very bright. you have a very interesting country and you can be a frontrunner in for example new energy sources which we need so badly in the world.
i hope the loans you received will help you to get through these difficult times and open up new opportunities.
Secondly, your reputation got really damaged by your gouvernment not keeping to agreements made with the dutch government about taking out 500 million euros of savings from the dutch market. in august dutch officials went to iceland and were told iceland was not going to keep to the agreements. they already took 1 billion at that time. dutch government should have told us but decided not to probably because it would have created the first banking crash. that’s why so many people lost a lot of money to icesave. it would be great if those people with savings over 100.000 would be compensated for the amount over 100.000.
good luck vikings, you have done it before and you can do it again.
>>In Iceland we still don’t have advertisements like in the UK about “consolidating your repayments to be able to afford those holidays you always dreamed of”.
Yet Iceland’s personal and national debt situation is the worst in the world.
The way its structured debt (and the sources of those debts) allowed Iceland to build up a large amount of it at low cost. It replaced the cost of debt with a very, very high risk.
In the UK people used to consolidate their debt to get a lower interest rate (although as all loans are expensive now its doesn’t have any benefit) that isn’t some thing to criticise, as it was always a very sensible thing to do.
Icelanders, however, can be fairly describe as the most irresponsible borrowers on the entire planet. They have gambled their entire lives on the smallest, most unstable, overvalued currency, out-performing the worlds most stable currencies during an economic crisis.
Utter madness.
>>It is quite normal, unfortunately that those of you who do not know Icelanders and Icelandic culture through day to day contact should be prey to the negative propaganda the British government and medias carried on for 8 weeks now
Another example of Islanders ability to believe their own propaganda.
First, there is virtually no mention of Iceland in UK media, nobody could give a **** about it. UK government has done a great job protecting UK savers. Brown has gone from a being far behind the opposition in the Polls to even. He will probably win the next election – something that seemed impossible two months ago. The Media isn’t going to bang on about Gordon Browns successes, such as against Iceland.
Second, UK didn’t called Icelanders terrorists, thats was how Iceland controlled media declared it. The UK laws were anti-Mafia, anti-criminal measures to stop UK assets being stolen by a foreign power.
If you want to complain about Britain’s actions, complain about being called organised, thieving criminals. Thats a title thats harder to rebuke – at least when applied to your government and bankers.
Subsequent events with the EU and IMF have proven the UK actions as justified, fair, legal and correct.
as i understand it there are a couple of businessmen, a father and a son, who own mostly all of iceland. they own the newspapers, they own the television stations, they own(ed) the banks, they own major industry and possibly they own(ed) the government.
it’s very important that there is going to be a new government. Haarde can’t be taken serious.
and where are these businessmen?
and where is the money?
and indeed there is very little news about iceland exept for the imf loan, in the rest of the world, as peter mentioned.
Well said Peter-London!!!
anne Amsterdam, you seem to have understand very well the situation over here. Well done.
To Peter – London:
>>>>Subsequent events with the EU and IMF have proven the UK actions as justified, fair, legal and correct.
Just because EU was able to force the Icelandic to accept responsibility for the 20000 Euros for IceSave/Edge depositors, does not necessarily mean UK actions were “justified, fair, legal and correct”.
Lets look at each of the four words you used to describe the UK actions:
Justified:
If you consider that, “the end justifies the means”, then you could maybe call the UK actions justified. If the goal was to force the Icelandic government to take on the final responsibility for the Deposit Guarantee Scheme Fund, then you could call this justified, but I would not feel so good about it (see below).
Fair:
It maybe considered fair for the UK and Netherlands, but much more difficult to argue that this was fair for Iceland. This unfairness especially applies to the Icelandic population which will be on the hook for large multi-billion euro loans they will potentially have to pay for in the future through their own taxes. Remember the people in Iceland had nothing to do with the banks decisions to start IceSave/Edge and start accepting deposits in the UK.
Legal:
This is very murky issue legally. I think its a real stretch to say, that just because Iceland was successfully forced to accept backing the Deposit Guarantee Scheme Fund, irrespective of what the actual laws and treaties stated, that this somehow made the UK actions legal.
The EU simply refused to let this go to the European courts, where normally disputes about agreements are supposed to be handled.
The only reasons I heard for the EU refusal to let this go to court, were that there were some questions which courts would actually have jurisdiction, and secondly, that the EU worried that if this would go to court, it could potentially jeopardize Deposit Guarantee Scheme Funds in other European countries. Neither of these reasons could be used to say that the UK position was legal, only courts would be able to judge that.
Correct:
It remains to be seen who was actually “correct” in this whole issue. Only history will allow us to judge that later.
Iceland will now get loans from UK and Netherlands to handle paying out the depositors their 20K Euros. If the old Landsbanki assets will not cover the 20K amount for each depositor, then the Icelandic government will have to take further loans to cover the difference, which will probably take some decades for it to pay back.
This all means the UK and Dutch governments will have to come up anyway with the payout money out of their own funds, although it is now treated as a loan to the Icelandic government. Even for the UK government, the 5-10 billion pounds total they will now have to finance, is a real money, that could have been put to better use elsewhere.
It would have been much more clever, if all the governments involved had worked together in the beginning to avoid the whole situation of letting the banks fail and therefore force the payout of the depositors. No government or country gained anything of real value from freezing the banks and seizing their assets.
Peter – London said:
“In the UK people used to consolidate their debt to get a lower interest rate (although as all loans are expensive now its doesn’t have any benefit) that isn’t some thing to criticise, as it was always a very sensible thing to do”
I’m sure UK people believed it was the sensible thing to do.
Make your debt disappear :) remember that one?
In reality, people put all their personal debts from credit cards, bad debts, other debts etc into one debt which was added to their mortgage,
And while you are going to all that bother, take out a personal loan at the same time – which will be added to the mortgaged sum
Jack and Jill could carry on spending – beyond their means.
And for the financial institution this was a godsend, suddenly a shaky debt was now lock solid secure and consumer spending resumed. Happy days.
Any news on the Royal Bank of Scotland ?-, the embodiment of Banking prudence :)
At least the British people got an apology from the Bank.
Someday it will be explained how £60bn suddenly became £6bn.
Surely they won’t be blaming anyone else for that? :)
The interest only, on the UK national debt is already £31bn. next year £37bn plus the hidden Public Finance Initiative debt has come out of its hiding place valued at £7bn but looks like it will be £20bn, it is actually £70bn but we wont go into that.
It certainly does look like the UK will give Iceland a bit of a run for its money in the reckless economic losers marathon. There might even be a bit of a sprint finish when the derivitives mess hits the fan and the premiere of “Bloodbath on the High Street” gets a screening in the new year.
Sorry for that its just the Brits are always an easy target.