Iceland enjoying progress and recovery via allowing banks to fail and not creating austerity.

[frazzled]

3. Iceland has a population of 319,000

About the size of the city of St. Louis proper, which tags in at 318,069. Not the population of metropolitan St. Louis, mind you ... which is around 2,882,932 ... but just the "downtown" area of St. Louis. The 58th largest city in this vast and complex country of ours.

How can we possibly draw any conclusions from Iceland's economy as opposed to the massive and complicated US economy? Iceland's rapid adoption of free-market policies in the 1990s led to a spectacular financial crisis a decade later. "Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland’s banking collapse (wa)s the largest suffered by any country in economic history." They had to be funded by the IMF. The big international banking sector that arose there was the main cause of the country's stellar rise and equally stellar fall, and that has been all but eradicated. But we have to put things in perspective: the big unemployment that occurred there involved ... 7000 people.

Iceland tried to be a big international finance competitor; it tore them down. Now they're back to manufacturing and fishing.