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13-minute video from the Wall Street Journal.
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Here is yet another post from early last year which presages all of the problems we are seeing today. As I have often written, the fake recovery is just an attempt to paper over these problems. It won’t work. Where Ireland, Switzerland, Austria or the Baltics were front and center in February 2009, Greece, Spain and Portugal are now. But don’t think those other problems have gone away. As with Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, contagion spreads to the weakest link – which either passes the test (usually with external aid) or collapses. And then it’s on to the next weakest link. That’s how crises work. This one is no different.

After Iceland collapsed and went into Depression, there were a number of reports in the press regarding countries with outsized financial sectors. The worry was that the collapse of Iceland was not an isolated incident, but rather a harbinger of things to come for smaller countries with large financial sectors. I wrote a post in November called “Iceland: a cautionary tale for small nations” which pointed to a number of countries that I considered vulnerable including Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. Even the United Kingdom has been a concern.

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.

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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:

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Jon Danielsson has a very thorough piece up on the VoxEU site which details the catastrophic collapse of Iceland and its banking system. This is a cautionary tale on two fronts.
First, Iceland was a small country with a very large banking system. This has meant the country is simply not big enough to bail [...]