Since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, there has actually been much debate about reforming the monetary sector and enhancing the accountability of its major actors. Numerous of the principals involved in producing the mess which led to the greatest monetary disaster since the Great Depression, are still in major positions of impact and power.

Discover more at http://beta.ineteconomics.org/

Gudrun Johnsen, currently an assistant teacher at the University of Iceland, and a co-organiser of the Institutes “Finance and Society” conference to be kept in Washington DC on May 5th-6th this year, has a special perspective to share: As a Senior Researcher with Icelands Special Investigation Commission, she had a front row seat of the rise and fall of the Icelandic banking system. In lots of aspects, Iceland represents “Ground Zero” of the international monetary crisis, insofar as it offers of microcosm of a number of the stopped working pathologies of the banking system that has actually controlled the international economy for the previous 30 years. In Iceland, the combined collapse of the nations three biggest banks in 2008 represented the largest banking system collapse suffered by any country in contemporary financial history, relative to GDP. How could small Iceland build a banking system in less than a years that proportionally exceeded Switzerlands? Why did the lenders choose to grow the system so fast? How did companies tunnel cash out of the banking system? Why didnt anybody stop them? Many saliently, what are the more comprehensive lessons that can be applied to the global monetary system as an entire today to guarantee that we dont have more Icelands?