Despite the prospect of some light appearing at the end of what has been a very dark tunnel; Danish banks are preparing themselves for another difficult year ahead. The country’s largest operator, Danske Bank, has recently released its accounts for last year and has predicted that 2010 will continue to be an uphill battle for the nation’s financial institutions. Read the full story

An economic analysis written by Nordea, the Baltic and Scandinavian financial services group:

At the threshold of the new decade it is clear that the world economy has finally moved out of recession. 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

It’s not a good time to be a car dealer in Sweden. The lingering economic recession affected consumer car sales to the tune of a 13.9 percent drop in new car registrations in July, year-on-year. The total of 14,512 new car registrations in July represents a 25 per cent fewer car sales compared to last year. Read the full story

The sustained global economic recession isn’t deterring Finland from building more resorts to try and lure tourists to the remote Nordic countryside. A new four-star hotel is going to be built on top of the Levitunturi fell, a stunning site just minutes away from the centre of the Lapland resort town of Levi and accessible by gondola. Read the full story

Finland’s government has agreed on a stimulus package worth around 2 billion euros, an amount that represents 1.7 per cent of the nation’s GDP. As Finland teeters on the edge of recession, it is hoped this injection of funding into the economy will prevent a return to the staggeringly high unemployment figures in the 1990s, when 20 per cent of Finns were out of work. Read the full story

The Finnish ministry of finance stated on its website that it expects the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to drop by more than two percent in 2009. Higher costs for financing building deals and a stagnant housing market caused a sharp decline in the construction industry at the end of 2008, causing Finland’s GDP to noticeably slow down. Read the full story

Sweden’s government has released data showing the nation’s economic growth has slowed to its weakest levels in more than 30 years. Anders Borg, Sweden’s Finance Minister, announced the bad news along with a forecast that the Swedish economy will shrink by 0.8 percent in 2009. Read the full story

According to a recent forecast from the International Monetary Fund, Iceland’s economic growth in 2008 will be higher than the IMF had predicted in its previous forecast from last year, reports Iceland Review.

Despite the severe economic slowdown currently facing world markets, the Icelandic economy is predicted to grow 0.4 percent in 2008, thus avoiding the recession some experts had predicted.

Although the forecast predicts slower growth for 2009, it states that Iceland will likely reach the average growth rate for industrialised nations again by 2012.

The current period of economic readjustment comes at the end of over a decade of unprecedented growth in Iceland, which has seen the island nation become one of the richest countries in the world per capita of population. Iceland currently ranks top of the United Nations Human Development Index, measuring countries’ wealth and living standards.

Unemployment in Iceland is still below one percent, but a recent report by Nordic bank Glitnir stated that it could peak as high as four percent in 2009 – a rate still lower than many European countries at present.

The Prime Minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, said the economy could evade a recession forecast by the Ministry of Finance and the Icelandic Central Bank, reports Bloomberg.

“I am not so sure we will actually have negative growth rates,” said Haarde in Latvia last week. It is “one of the objectives of the government to ensure that we don’t go into a recession.”

Both the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank have said the Icelandic economy will contract in 2009 after interest rates rose to a record 15.5 per cent in response to heightened inflation.

A 24 per cent drop in the Icelandic krona (ISK) against the euro this year has helped push inflation to an 18-year record of 12.3 per cent in May.

However, growing exports have slashed Iceland’s trade deficit to 600 million kronur ($7.7 million) in May from 7.3 billion kronur in 2007, boosting economic growth as imports slow.

Haarde said the krona “is more likely to come back up than go down. I think it will find a new equilibrium at a level quite a lot higher than it is now.”

The krona has fallen following concerns that the credit crunch may limit Icelandic banks’ access to funding, though Nordic bank Glitnir last week reported that the real exchange rate of the ISK rose in May according to figures from the Central Bank.

The Prime Minister’s comments follow moves by the Central Bank to increase its reserves of foreign currency. The government recently approved a bill allowing the bank to borrow as much as 500 billion kronur ($6.4 billion) in foreign currencies, equivalent to more than a third of Iceland’s GDP.