I know, I know, you think you’ve got it bad just because your 401(k) is worthless, or you’re out of a job at a once-respected investment bank, or you’re having a heck of a time finding anyone to give you enough credit to buy a package of ramen so you don’t starve, but hey.  Look on the bright side.  At least you don’t live in Iceland, where fail has been turned into an art form.

I sort of glossed over Iceland’s troubles in an earlier post, because I fail at responsible blogging or, you know, reading the news.  But their economy is getting to’ up over there.  Banks are getting seized left and right.  Landsbanki was bad, Kaupthing is worse.  Yes, Icelandic bankers name their banks things like Landsbanki and Kaupthing, although this has nothing to do with why they are failing.

The country has asked Russia for a four-billion-euro loan, is expected to hit up the IMF for money, and may find itself working in a Dutch sex shop before long.  The three banks together hold over $60b in debt, which may not sound like a lot to we Americans who do everything bigger, but the total size of Iceland’s economy is around $5b so you can see where this is going.  The krona is tanking, as one might have expected, losing well over half its value in a very short period of time.  The government had tried to peg its value against the euro at 131:1, but that failed miserably and Iceland’s central bank blamed “the market” instead of “stupid investments” as the currency’s value slid to nearly 150:1 against the euro.

So that’s their story, the entire country may end up bankrupt before the end of the year, and that is sad because just last year the UN declared Iceland to be the best country in the world to live in.  I guess that is still true if you live completely off the grid and like umlauts.

You know Karl Marx is laughing his beard off right now, somewhere.  If he were alive today, he would be insufferable.

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ED: Hopefully Jason won’t mind, but I could not resist doing a LOL for this topic, as well. ~Alyx