Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The collapse of the Icelandic banks: a comment on Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/cje/bet078

1464-3545

Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson,

European Socioeconomic and Political Studies

In a paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics on the 2008 collapse of the whole Icelandic banking sector (Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir, 2012), Professor Robert Wade of the London School of Economics and Professor Sigurbjorg Sigurgeirsdottir of the University of Iceland discuss my contribution to the collapse, my scholarly credentials and the activities of Iceland’s central bank where I served on the Supervisory Board in 2001–09. I should like briefly to correct three of their statements. First, Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir (2012) say: ‘The leading Icelandic champion of free-market economics declared in the Wall Street Journal: “[Prime Minister] Oddsson’s experiment with liberal policies is the greatest success story in the world” (Gissurarson, 2004A)’. Flattered as I should perhaps be by this description of me, the problem is that I never wrote the words Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir put within quotation marks, as a simple check on the Internet—where the Wall Street Journal article is accessible—will reveal. Probably the closest I came in my article (Gissurarson, 2004A) to the gushing declaration attributed to me by the two professors was the following: ‘Now, after a radical and comprehensive course of liberalization that mirrors similar reforms in Thatcher’s Britain, New Zealand and Chile, Iceland has emerged as one of the world’s most prosperous countries’. In the next paragraph I added: ‘Much of the credit goes to Prime Minister David Oddsson’, proceeding to elaborate on achievements in the 1991–2004 period when Oddsson was Prime Minister. Indeed, in 2004 Iceland enjoyed the fifth highest GDP per capita in Europe (World Bank, 2004). The difference in tone and content between my statement and that attributed to me by Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir is obvious. If Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir want to interpret my words in their own way, they should at least refrain from putting them within quotation marks.