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Two small island economies blew up in 2008. Iceland and Ireland. Their names differ by one letter, and their handling of the crisis differed by everything that matters. Iceland’s three big banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir, had grown assets to roughly ten times the country’s GDP by 2008. Pure credit-fueled madness.
When the music stopped, the Icelandic government did the unthinkable: it let them fail. Bondholders ate the losses.
The state refused to socialize private bank debt onto 320,000 citizens who never signed up for it.
Capital controls went up, the króna collapsed, and the politicians actually prosecuted bankers. Twenty-six of them went to prison. Sigurður Einarsson and Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, the men who ran Kaupthing, served real sentences.
Ireland took the opposite road.
In September 2008, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee covering the liabilities of its major banks, including Anglo Irish Bank, a property-lending casino that should have been allowed to die in peace.
The taxpayer absorbed the bill. By the time the rescue ended, Ireland had poured around 64 billion euros into its banks, roughly 40 percent of GDP.
The state took on private gambling debts, then went to the Troika in 2010 hat in hand for an 85 billion euro bailout, and accepted years of austerity to pay for losses it had no business owning.
Both economies recovered. Both eventually grew again.
The difference is who paid and who learned. Iceland made creditors and reckless bankers bear the consequences of their own decisions, which is the entire point of capitalism: profit and loss, not profit and bailout.
Ireland protected the people who made the bad bets and handed the invoice to schoolteachers and shopkeepers.
You will hear economists call Ireland’s GDP rebound a triumph (much of that “growth” is multinational accounting fiction, Leprechaun economics, but that’s another lesson).
What they skip is the moral architecture. When you guarantee bank liabilities, you abolish the discipline that makes markets work. You tell every banker in the country that downside is optional. Iceland jailed its bankers. Ireland reimbursed theirs.
canisgallicus 