Product Description

It is a truism that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. The subprime mortgage crisis, which began in America in 2007, unleashed a veritable epidemic of financial ill health all over the world. All European countries were affected, and the developing world also felt a chill. However it was Iceland, a tiny volcanic outcrop in the North Atlantic whose population of 300,000 had the highest GDP and counted itself the happiest in the world, which caught the worst cold. It has nearly killed them. For a few short years, the Icelanders deluded themselves that they were rich. Dour Reykjavik became the Capital of Cool. Rock musicians like Damon Albarn bought houses and stakes in pubs. Clubs boomed, the alcohol was expensive and the Krona was strong. All over the world people are trying to understand what caused the economic crisis and are asking themselves who is to blame. In Iceland that question is easily answered and the handful of bankers and politicians responsible have had to hire body guards, hole themselves up in their country houses and stay off the streets for fear of attack. Collaborating with the business editor of Iceland's leading daily newspaper, award-winning writer Roger Boyes tells the inside story of the bankrupting of Iceland and explains how it has ramifications for us all, from the private and public investors who trusted their money in Iceland's banks, to the workers in high street clothes stores whose owners no longer can pay for the shirts on their own backs. Writing with panache and colour, and drawing on interviews with everyone from artists and policitians to the local fisherman, Meltdown Iceland is an authoritative and compelling account of the financial destruction of this tiny, icy but vibrant country.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13285 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
`It is hard to think of a European country more incompetently run in the past 20 years than Iceland ... Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely year after some of the events it describes' --Sunday Times

`Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely a year after some of the events it describes. He knows Iceland well and conveys the strangeness of the landscape, the dogged decency of its people and the endless "white nights" of the Arctic summer' --Robert Harris, Sunday Times

`Boyes, an award-winning foreign correspondent who has been reporting in Icelandic affaires for the past three decades, gives an admirably succinct account of the Kreppa's causes and effects. He shows the complex interweaving and rivalries within and between its nascent oligarchies, invariably with a telling detain to illuminate each stage of the descent into economic chaos'
--Scotsman

About the Author
Roger Boyes is a writer and prize-winning European correspondent for The Times newspaper. He has been reporting from Iceland since he was sent on his first foreign assignment to cover the Cod Wars in 1976 and is the author of eleven previous books.