One picture, nearly a thousand words: Lessons from Iceland

Ever since the news broke that Iceland’s (now former) prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlauggsson, holds a secret offshore account worth millions of dollars, Iceland has been in political turmoil. The revelation came via the Panama Papers, those records leaked from Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which is, as the Guardian described it, “at the heart of the global offshore industry”.

On the surface, the immediate concern was the prime minister’s past joint ownership of an offshore shell company. More specifically, the problem is that he’d sold his stake in that company for a dollar to his wife, and co-owner, in 2009, rather than disclose it to the people of Iceland. Even more specifically, the problem was that the company, Wintris, is a creditor to some of Iceland’s biggest banks, to the tune of about US$4.2 billion. In other words, it’s the very same kind of creditor that Gunnlaggsson has ostensibly railed against and upon which, as prime minister, he had sworn to get tough.

---

And so, here is a picture of a few thousand people in a square in Reykjavik in the cool early April air last week, all facing a small stage set up on a truck trailer. We see them, as we have for a while now perhaps, as outsiders and from a distance. But it feels as if we are maybe closer to them than ever. Or that we have caught up with them. As if our universes finally swung back together again suddenly, on the other side of that skewed timeline that veered off sometime around 2009. And that in the interim separation we have all begun to recognize what the financial system they adopted taught them, what they guessed all along, and what they still know as they stand in that square: that nothing is too big to fail.



http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/one-picture-nearly-a-thousand-words-lessons-from-iceland/