Iceland's Deep Freeze.(The Talk of the Town)

By now, we're all familiar with the major victims of the subprime meltdown: greedy mortgage brokers, overleveraged hedge funds, feckless banks and brokerages, incautious homeowners, and so on. But the crisis is also wreaking havoc in places that, on the surface, might seem to have nothing to do with the price of foreclosed homes in Miami. Places, that is, like Iceland.

Insofar as Americans think about Iceland at all, it's as a land whose remoteness belies a vibrant cultural scene featuring hipster titans, like Bjork and Sigur Ros, and exceptional social conditions--it's the top-rated country in the U.N.'s most recent human-development index. But in the financial world Iceland is now a hot topic of discussion for a different reason: many people suggest that it could become the "first national casualty" of the ongoing credit crunch. Until last year, Iceland's economic track record in this decade had been phenomenal--its annual growth rate averaged close to four per cent over the past decade, and its per-capita gross national income is now higher than that of the U.S. This year, though, the country's currency, the krona, has fallen twenty-two per cent against the euro; the economy has stagnated; and a global rating agency has put the nation's three major banks on a credit watch. Now analysts are wondering whether the new Nordic Tiger will end up, instead, as "the Bear Stearns of the North Atlantic."

So how did Iceland get in so much trouble? That's the odd part of the story: it isn't because its banks gambled on the worthless subprime securities that helped undo Bear Stearns and so many others. Iceland's banks prudently avoided the subprime market, even as they embarked on a lending boom at home and expanded abroad. What got Iceland in trouble was something more subtle: its banks got their money primarily from international investors, making the Icelandic miracle heavily dependent on foreign capital.

In normal times, this might not have mattered, given the country's solid economic fundamentals. But these aren't normal times. The subprime crisis, in which investors realized that they had greatly underestimated the risks of lending to people with bad credit, has spawned a wider credit crunch: investors now suspect disaster behind every door, and even seemingly solid borrowers find credit much harder to come by. The subprime crisis was an earthquake that caused a tsunami: the quake has done plenty of damage on its own, but the tsunami looks set to do even more.

Iceland has been swamped by that tsunami because it trusted in the availability of global credit in time for that credit to evaporate. And the fact that Iceland has been so dependent on foreign investors makes those investors even more skittish about investing there: in markets, weakness often begets weakness. Further, the country's troubles have made it a potential target for speculators seeking to drive down the value of its currency and perhaps cause a run on the ...