Overview

The inside story of the bankrupting of Iceland It is a truism that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. The sub-prime mortgage crisis, which began in America in 2007, unleashed a veritable epidemic of financial ill health all over the world. All European countries were affected, and the developing world also felt a chill. However it was Iceland, a tiny volcanic outcrop in the North Atlantic whose population of 300,000 had the highest per capita GDP and counted itself the happiest in the world, which caught the worst cold. It has nearly killed them. Written with panache and colour, and drawing on interviews with everyone from the prime minister, Sir Phillip Green, the governor of the central bank, Bjork and the local fisherman, Meltdown Iceland is an authoritative account of the financial destruction of this tiny, icy but vibrant country.

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9781408803080

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"'Boyes's utterly gripping account of how Iceland swiftly became the ""microcosm"" of a planetary market panic yields as crisp and bleak a saga of the downside of globalisation as you will ever read. As he traces the nation's journey from free-spending hubris to bankrupt nemesis, a story emerges of such eerie and bizarre drama that you feel caught up in some parable co-written by Ballard and Pratchett' Independent 'Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely year after some of the events it describes. He knows Iceland well and conveys the strangeness of the landscape, the dogged decency of its people and the endless ""white nights"" of the Arctic summer.' Robert Harris, Sunday Times 'Boyes gets close to the heart of the corporate skull-duggery' Financial Times 'Boyes, a Times correspondent, efficiently analyses Iceland as a microcosm of a bigger problem and considers its next moves' The Times"

'Boyes's utterly gripping account of how Iceland swiftly became the microcosm of a planetary market panic yields as crisp and bleak a saga of the downside of globalisation as you will ever read. As he traces the nation's journey from free-spending hubris to bankrupt nemesis, a story emerges of such eerie and bizarre drama that you feel caught up in some parable co-written by Ballard and Pratchett' Independent 'Boyes has done a remarkable job to produce this book barely year after some of the events it describes. He knows Iceland well and conveys the strangeness of the landscape, the dogged decency of its people and the endless white nights of the Arctic summer.' Robert Harris, Sunday Times 'Boyes gets close to the heart of the corporate skull-duggery' Financial Times 'Boyes, a Times correspondent, efficiently analyses Iceland as a microcosm of a bigger problem and considers its next moves' The Times

Author Information

Roger Boyes is a writer and prize-winning European correspondent for The Times newspaper. He has been reporting from Iceland since he was sent on his first foreign assignment to cover the Cod Wars in 1976 and is the author of eleven previous books.

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