Iceland and the International Financial Crisis: Boom, Bust, and Recovery

In autumn 2008 Iceland became the poster child of the global Credit Crunch when its three international banks came tumbling down within a single week, amounting to one of the greatest national financial crisis. The tiny Nordic country was reported as being a rogue state defaulting on its obligation. Leading up to the Crash Iceland had been triumphed in world business media as an economic miracle. Its new breed of Viking Capitalist had become rock stars of the global finance driven economy. Now their action was testing the foundations of Europe’s financial system. The threat of a domino effect was imminent. Five years on Iceland is well on the road to recovery, with greater growth and less unemployment than in most European states.

The paper, based on a book forthcoming by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014, is original in the way in which it wants to widen attention towards the Icelandic Financial Crisis. The main novelty is the use of postcolonial analysis to cast a cultural light of Iceland’s political and economic behaviour before, during and after the Crash. The key point is to relate questions over the Icelandic Financial Crisis to aspects of a financialised world and questions of nationality, finance, the economy and the European Union that are opened up in that encounter. The book of necessity takes a critical approach to the claims of the financialization advocates, and provides an approach that relates the questions of the national economy and globalisation to current trends in Europe and the World