The fact that Iceland is treating the banksters like more or less common criminals points to a cultural feature of a small Nordic country. For example, the small country of Sweden has an large complex industrial culture that encompasses automobile, truck, bus, and ship manufacture, specialty steel, telecommunication equipment, and a host of smaller enterprises that fill in the gaps. Not surprisingly in a country of only 10 million, everyone knows someone who works for a living doing tasks that are often FAR more difficult than anything they do in the financial world. Iceland has figured out how to survive a very difficult climate by tapping geothermal resources and other amazing feats with a population of only 321,000. This fact leads to the cultural question, Why should we treat the financial services business as special and privileged?
This question is fading in the Nordic countries as they slowly lose industrial activity to Asia and the teachings of neoliberalism becomes more mainstream, but there is still enough animus towards the idea that banking is inherently elite to put banksters in jail.
Real Economics
Iceland sends another bankster to jail, USA has many more crooks but...Jonathan Larson
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