"...Iceland's economy is doing pretty well they where the only country to out of hand reject placing the private bank debt onto their tax payers..." Sorta, but

"...Iceland's economy is doing pretty well they where the only country to out of hand reject placing the private bank debt onto their tax payers..." Sorta, but I think that's a little garbled. The big question is "should the government guarantee the debts of private banks". The textbook/neoliberal answer is "no, of course not, that would be insane". However, at the behest of the EU, Ireland did exactly that - an unprecedented move which has worked out pretty much exactly how everyone THOUGHT it would: badly. Iceland, by contrast, went with the textbook answer (the Bloomberg story you link to even says this explicitly) of telling the creditors of private banks to get stuffed. They aren't the first nor yet the hundredth country to do that, and they won't be the last. And it working out fairly well for them, all things considered. What's unusual here isn't how Iceland has behaved, but how Ireland has behaved. And it's there we should be looking to draw the real lessons about what to do and - more importantly - not do about future bank crises. (The Irish bank debt guarantee may yet prove to be the single silliest decision in the whole European debt crisis. Considering the competition, that's impressive.)