Icelanders are simply speechless after what has happened to our country in the global financial storms. Yesterday we had it all. Now it seems we have been wiped out in a major way and have to call on the International Monetary Fund or even the Russians to help us out of the mess.

People here are extremely angry. We are angry because we were told that everything was in order with the banks. More than 50,000 small shareholders had stakes in the banks and their savings were simply wiped out. These were ordinary people like you and me who had decided to stick with the banks through the financial meltdown and had been assured that everything would be all right in the long run.

We are angry because the banks seem to have organized programs to trick people in Iceland into placing their savings in bond accounts which were claimed to be 99 percent safe instead of keeping them in normal deposit accounts.

We are angry and shamed over the fact that normal people overseas have to tighten their belts and face loosing their savings because of our banks.

We are angry with the politicians who obviously knew of the difficulties the banks were facing after many warnings from abroad and from skeptics of the Icelandic economic boom who said that the banks had become too large and greedy.

We are angry with the billionaire owners who ran the banks and pretty much everything else in this country and have now disappeared in times of trouble.

We are angry with the authorities who did not step in and demand some securities from the conglomerate banks to prevent this economic meltdown from happening.

We are angry with ourselves for being foolish and for not having listened to the voices that warned us about the recklessness of the banks.

And we are extremely angry over the outrageous behavior of Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown who invoked anti-terrorism legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks in the UK when the British government had been assured by our government that depositors of Icelandic banks in the UK would be paid. Many believe this led to the downfall of Kaupthing Bank, the last of our three largest commercial banks to remain standing after the others were nationalized, like the last tree in the hurricane.

We have always considered Britain to be one of our closest allies and friends. For a British politician to gain momentum by stepping on the toes of a miniscule state like ours is simply too much for us to stomach on top of the economic difficulties we are now facing. It is like stomping on a lying man’s head.

Although I’m still angry with my own government for having been too weak to control the Icelandic “oligarchs,” I have to say that I’ve felt some admiration for our own Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde during this crisis.

He has never lost his face despite being harassed by the world press and the British government. Haarde has remained cool and firm as a stone, disciplined and polite as ever while the storms rage all around him and the economy tumbles like a house of cards. I do not envy him of his job these days.

Our Minister of Commerce, Björgvin G. Sigurdsson, has been equally respectable in this period of time where so much has been lost. In times like these we need men and women who are firm as rocks and do not give up once faced with difficult challenges.

There is much to be learned from this global crisis. The most important lesson is probably that we should not let greed get the better of us and that reputation is the only thing that lives after everything else is gone.

As the ancient Icelandic poem Hávamál says:

Deyr fé,
deyja fraendur.
Deyr sjálfur id sama
En ordstír deyr aldregi,
hveim sér gódan getur.

Here in the translation of W.H. Auden:

Cattle die, kindred die,
Every man is mortal:
But the good name never dies
Of one who has done well

We should all think about those wise words during these difficult times.

BB – bjarni@icelandreview.com