Iceland betrays us!

Well, as the US economy crashes a la Depression Era style, one may wonder about the little countries of the world and how they are doing. Ok, maybe no one is really wondering that, but of course, if the US economy fails, it will bring everyone else down with them! Way to go, teamwork USA! Anyways, as you may or may not have heard, Fortis, the big leaders in mortgages in the Benelux, failed and the gov't will bail them out and buy up shares. Iceland's banks have failed, and the gov't took control of all three of their national banks. Seems its like dominoes now.

Up til now, this crisis doesn't directly affect me, except for the dollar-euro exchange rate! Or at least that's what I thought. A few months ago, M opened up a savings account with the Icelandic bank Icesave, which is (was) a purely online banking system. No statements, no hard copy proof....everything online. There was a 5.25% interest rate on the account, and it had good reviews (according to what M found). It was a branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki. Icesave only opened up their international banking to UK and Dutch investors only. Well, these banks failed, and Icesave went bottom up earlier this week. We could not even load the page on Wednesday when we realized we should try to withdraw our money. The UK customer's page had a message that all accounts were frozen and no one could withdraw their money. So, while we are still quite young to not have a large savings account, it is still significant enough to be upset about! So, we could be set to lose all our savings due to this worldwise financial crisis.

Now, I'm a nervous person to begin with. I am worried and anxious about quite a few things in life, more than the average person, I'd say. But for some reason, I'm not freaking out about this. I am not worried that we won't get it back. Iceland was supposed to guarantee the first 20,000 euros, and anything above that, the Dutch gov't pays back. Of course we don't have more than 20,000euros, so it shouldn't be a big deal....right?

Then there's the threat of the Iceland gov't being bankrupt. So who's going to give us our money back?

Well, last night, we, as one of 120,000 Dutch customers of Icesave, were assured that we would get our money back, by the Dutch finance minister. Here's a short english article summing up the current situation.

So, while I truely love Iceland (its the special place where M proposed and also a very very beautiful country), I can't help but be upset by their goverment...who stole our money!! A country of only 320,000 people... had billions and billions worth of euros invested in their country by 2 others.....as the PM of Iceland said yesterday: "I think this is a good lesson in the fact that a small country should not aim to be a world leader in international banking."

If that's not a "doh!" moment, I don't know what is.