Columbia University Professor and former Federal Reserve official Frederic Mishkin wrote a much-discussed Op-Ed in the Financial Times yesterday. In it, he asks
Are potential asset-price bubbles always dangerous?

He answers this question with a no, noting that some asset bubbles are more dangerous than others because of their connection to debt and credit. I agree [...]

Today, Moody’s warned that Iceland, Latvia and Hungary were stabilizing but that their economies remained fragile. The problem is high debt levels, which is restraining consumer spending. Recovery in the Eurozone has been the main aid to stabilization, the report said. Absent this support, the outlook is considerably worse.
Moody’s re-affirmed Iceland and Hungary’s ratings of [...]

From the FT.
Iceland’s bid to join the European Union received a boost on Monday when the 27-nation bloc’s foreign ministers agreed without delay to ask the European Commission for its opinion.
The swift decision means that Iceland, which only submitted its membership application on July 17, has already moved ahead of Balkan countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina [...]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a good piece on Iceland out today at the Telegraph. The main point of his article is that Iceland is emerging from crisis and depression in a relatively healthy state due to a fifty percent currency devaluation.  While, GDP will shrink by 7% this year in Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Estonia and many [...]

13-minute video from the Wall Street Journal.
Related stories:

Iceland warms to Europe
Iceland to hand bank stakes to creditors
Iceland’s rehabilitation

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As this deepest of recessions takes hold, an increasing number of countries are seeing outbreaks of civil unrest. First it was Greece. Later, we saw unrest in the Baltics in Riga and Vilnius. Now, Iceland is experiencing the same. These countries are amongst the hardest hit economies. Therefore, we should see these episodes as a harbinger of what is to come unless government can prevent this downturn from deepening.

The Irish government scrapped a planned recapitalization of Anglo Irish Bank and moved straight to full nationalization. While some may view this as a necessary move to shore up a troubled institution, I see this as ominous news because the Irish banking system is systemically weak and subject to a potential collapse along the lines of Iceland.

The question on everyone’s mind in the emerging markets is who will blow up next. Arnab Das of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson takes a stab at answering that question. He targets the Baltics as the problem children and sees current account surplus nations in Asia as lest vulnerable. He also discusses his views on Russia.

Below is the video with him on CNBC giving forth his view.

The Economist does a very good post-mortem on Iceland and its spectacular collapse with a number of lessons for other countries, especially those with oversized financial sectors like Ireland, Switzerland and the U.K.  Below is a snippet from their article which I highlight because it also demonstrates the real risk of social unrest due to [...]

Just a few moments ago I caught a very interesting post on Alice Cook’s site UK Bubble. The gist of the post was that things are falling apart in Ireland very quickly. Given what we saw with Iceland, I have to ask: is Ireland next?

I wouldn’t suppose that things are this fragile but we cannot dismiss out of hand talk of Ireland going the way of Iceland. Here is what Alice posted: