I declare war!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!

If you want further proof that Iceland is a godforsaken place to live then HERE IT IS!!!

Look at Beachgirl’s Debt-O-Meter in the left frame where she is tracking her student loans…

…she is paying off her loan AND IT ACTUALLY GOES DOWN!!!

Instead of this horrible, little rock in the ocean east of Greenland where a couple of hundred thousand people think they are so incredibly clever to have PRICE-INDEXED all their loans!!! 

A loan that actually goes down as you pay???? Who would have thought? Why aren’t Icelanders still using horse-carts and candle-lights instead of cars and electricity? Why are we so incredibly close-minded that we still prefer to pay to the hilt to banks and government institutions who proceed to rob us blind anyways? 

For betting on Iceland as a great place to start an independent life I have seen my home loan rise by 2.5 million ISK in the same period as I’ve paid 2.5 million onto it. I have seen my student loans rise like a kite on a windy day for the sin of being Icelandic. 

To quote the only sensible guy in Iceland: HELVITIS FOKKINGS FOKK!!!!

This is it. I am declaring war on this unjust and soul-crushing mechanism called price-indexation. I am tired of politicians and economists whose special interests stand in the way. Either the price-indexation goes or I stop paying taxes and leave the country.

It seems to work for Bjorgolfur Thor, Bjarni Armannsson, Olafur Olafsson and their like so here goes…

Jon Stewart vs. CNBC

 “If I had only taken CNBC’s advice, I would have a million dollars today—provided I started with $100 million.”

That’s how Jon Stewart started the fight with CNBC last week and the story since then is fascinating. Jim Cramer of Mad Money on CNBC took it personally and ended up on Stewart’s show. It is like watching a five year old being scolded for doing something bad, and given a life lesson.  The following excerpts are from the video which you can watch here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/index.jhtml 

JS: Isn’t that the whole point of this? CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets: One that has been sold to us as long term. Put your money in 401ks. Put your money in pensions and just leave it there. Don’t worry about it. It’s all doing fine. Then, there’s this other market; this real market that is occurring in the back room. Where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them and it’s transactional and it’s fast. But it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious and it hurts that long term market. So what it feels like to us-and I’m talking purely as a layman-it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard earned money. And that it is a game that you know… That you know is going on. But you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn’t happening.

JS: It is this idea that the financial news networks are not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission. That they are in bed with them.

JS: I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f–ing game. When I watch that I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me, because it says to me, you all know. You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

JS: What we’re getting is… Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.

JS: CNBC could act as-No one is asking them to be a regulatory agency, but can’t-but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile as their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day-to-day for short term. These guys’ companies were on a Sherman’s March through their companies, financed by our 401ks, and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f–ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell, and you guys knew that that was going on.

JS: There’s a market for cocaine and hookers. What is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? Who are you responsible to? The people with the 401ks and the pensions and the general public, or the Wall Street traders, and by the way this casts an aspersion on all of Wall Street when I know that’s unfair as well. The majority of those guys are working their asses off. They’re really bright guys. I know a lot of them. They’re just trying to do the right thing and they’re getting f–ed in the ass, too.

I’ll be back, promises Jon Asgeir Johannesson

This time round it will be a smaller, more focused operation, with less debt.

Together with the chairman of House of Fraser, Don McCarthy, they have registered a new company at Companies House called Tecamol and they have taken on a new office above the Watches of Switzerland store on Oxford Street, but it is still early days — perhaps too early since the wreckage of their last business.

“We are not just going to lie down and do nothing,” said Johannesson.

Will he get support from the business community? “You will never know until you try it . . . but people have come forward and said they will back us. We will have the guts to try.

“People were always very sceptical about us — especially at the beginning, but it will not be the last you see of us.”

From the Times

Baugur: ‘We were hit by a hurricane’

If Baugur’s rise epitomised the pre credit-crisis world – easy money, ambitious plans, and a young management team doing in four years what previously would have taken 40 – then its demise is the grim new world order made manifest.

Gunnar Sigurdsson, Baugur’s chief executive, arrives in the emptiness of the Mayfair office. Along with Jon Asgeir Johannesson, Baugur UK’s chairman, Mr Sigurdsson built the company up. He is dressed in jeans, clutching a Starbucks and looking exhausted.

He starts to explain where it all went wrong. “Basically, we were hit by a hurricane,” he said.

From the Sunday Telegraph