We're All Icelanders Now

If voters in the US or the UK had been given a vote on whether their governments should inject trillions of dollars into their banks (in the form of loans, guarantees and investments), it is pretty likely that those referenda would have been lost.

Most opinion polls indicated that citizens were furious with their banks - and were not persuaded that letting them fail would wreak the kind of economic havoc that would impoverish all of us.

So most economists, central bankers and finance ministers would probably say that we should be grateful that in America and Britain the people aren't quite as sovereign (if that makes sense) as in Iceland.'

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