Iceland says NO! Enough already. (creditors, loans, debt, 2009)

[Tightwad]

Iceland is broke but is refusing to pay their debt. It gets interesting from there.

Excerpt......
"That Iceland’s position as a sovereign state precludes legal process against its assets which are necessary for it to discharge in an acceptable manner its functions as a sovereign state.

Instead of imposing the kind of austerity programs that devastated Third World countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and led them to avoid the IMF like a plague, the Althing is changing the rules of the financial system. It is subordinating Iceland’s reimbursement of Britain and Holland to the ability of Iceland’s economy to pay.

This weekend’s pushback is a quantum leap that promises (or to creditors, threatens) to change the world’s financial environment. For the first time since the 1920s the capacity-to-pay principle is being made the explicit legal basis for international debt service."

http://notsylvia.wordpress.com/2009/...efusal-to-pay/

[floridasandy]

good for iceland! i bet the IMF world bankers are royally aggravated!

For three decades, the IMF has imposed "structural adjustment" on the developing world, using different names. In exchange for providing loans and, more importantly, a stamp of approval needed to access donor money, the IMF requires countries to adopt a series of market fundamentalist policies. These include deregulation (including of financial services), privatization, opening to foreign investment, orienting economies to export markets, removing protections for local producers growing food or manufacturing for the local market, removing labor rights protections, cutting government budgets, raising interest rates, and more.


in iceland's case, The Icelandic government's agreement with the IMF promised to make the bank assessments public upon their completion ìby end-march 2009. This has not been done, perhaps (one worries) because the next sentence says that the government ìwill discuss in advance with IMF staff any changes to the adopted strategy. In view of the secrecy that now shrouds the events that pushed the banks under, one can only wonder at what developments have prompted the government and IMF to change strategy. (sound like any other country we know?)

What the IMF did demand, as it always does, is that once the government bails out the bankers for their bad loans, the whole privatization process is to start all over again, paving the groundwork for yet new banking rip-offs.