Norway’s centrist party, one of three coalition partners, has recommended that Norway offers loans or credit lines up to ISK 2,000 billion, entirely unconnected to the IMF loans and the Icesave issue, according to Hoskuldur Thorhallsson, an Icelandic MP for the Progressive Party. Read the full story

Iceland cannot afford to wait much longer for the second tranche of loan funding from the IMF and its Nordic neighbours, Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir told Bloomberg this week. Read the full story

Gylfi Arnbjornsson, president of the Icelandic Confederation of Labour, said he hopes the contraction of Iceland’s national production has more or less come to a halt, in line with what Paul Thomsen, chair of the IMF Iceland Committee said on television yesterday. The public have not yet seen the worst of the recession though, Arnbjornsson warns. Read the full story

The former government of Iceland, under Geir H. Haarde, begged for and then rejected the offer of a multi-billion dollar loan from Russia, the Russian ambassador to Iceland said today. Read the full story

The scale of the loans made by Kaupthing Bank to large customers was neatly bound together into a stylish top-secret presentation shortly before the bank collapsed last autumn and then kept under lock and key until it recently appeared on a website called WikiLeaks. Read the full story

The Russian government has decided to approve a loan to the Icelandic government up to 64 billion Icelandic kronur (500 million USD). According to the Russian news source, Vedomosti, Assistant Secretary of Treasury in Russia Dmitry Pankin approved this today. Read the full story

Sigurjon Th. Arnason, former director of Landsbanki, received two loans from his private pension fund kept by the bank. The loans were a so-called bullet loan, meaning interest payment is only due once, at the end of the loan period after 20 years. The interest rate was 3.5 percent. One loan was for ISK 40 million and the other for ISK 30 million – 70 million altogether. Read the full story

Support loans from the Icelandic Student Loans Fund are not set to increase and will remain around ISK 100,000 (USD 780) per month for individuals, according to Morgunbladid sources. A student body representative said that the unchanged loan figure will start forcing students out of studying and onto unemployment benefit because their additional revenue raising options are now few-to-none. The Minister for Education is on record describing the situation as “serious”. Read the full story

After bailout talks with the Swedish government broke down, Volvo Cars has turned to the Belgian government for its help in securing a loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB). The best-known Swedish carmaker may be owned by the American company Ford, but it had hoped to win loan guarantees from Stockholm for the EUR 200 million the EIB is prepared to give it. Read the full story

A new Capacent Gallup poll was carried out on behalf of ASI (Icelandic Confederation of Labour) to asses the situation of Icelandic personal debt. The survey revealed that the majority of those questioned (62 percent) had inflation indexed mortgages in Icelandic kronur. The next biggest group (30 percent) was those with car loans denominated in foreign currencies. Read the full story