Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson will give a lecture Tuesday 5 November 2013 in a seminar at the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Iceland, 12–13, in room HT-101 in the University Plaza. The topic is: “Did an Octopus control the Icelandic Economy until the End of the 20th Century? And What Happened Then?” Professor Gissurarson will discuss the thesis presented in some recent works on Iceland, for example in the book Meltdown Iceland by British journalist Roger Boyes, and by Robert Wade and Sigurbjorg Sigurgeirsdottir in New Left Review, that until the final decade of the 20th Century, the Icelandic economy was dominated by an “Octopus” or some “Fourteen Families”, and after that by three business clans.

Professor Gissurarson will analyse the origin and meaning of the two concepts “The Fourteen Families” and “The Octopus” in the Icelandic debate, both of those concepts having interesting foreign roots. He will look at the empirical evidence for the hypothesis that groups which could be characterised in either of these two  ways had been dominant in the economy for some period of time. In this context he explores surveys of the biggest Icelandic companies in the 1980s and 1990s, the relative sizes of the private and the public sector in Iceland and the size and influence of the cooperative movement. He will move on to discuss the three business groups which became powerful in the early 2000s, the Baugur Clan, the Exista Group and the two Bjorgolfs, father and son. In the report by the Special Investigation Commission on the 2008 bank collapse it was criticized that public authorities did not regard those three groups as interrelated, creating an additional systemic risk. Professor Gissurarson’s lecture forms a part of the joint project of RNH and AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

The government is more and more becoming like a leviathan, a big beast, greedy for our money. Dr. Daniel Mitchell, the chief tax analyst at Cato Institute, will discuss how to starve the beast at a meeting jointly organised by RNH and the Icelandic Taxpayers’ Association, Monday 4 November, 12–13, in Askja, the House of Natural Sciences at the University of Iceland, Room N-131. Dr. Mitchell will discuss the recent increase of government spending in the wake of the international financial crisis. He will also describe the logic of the Laffer Curve which has created some controversy in Iceland: whereby government revenue will actually decrease with higher tax rates, as the tax basis gets eroded.

Mitchell’s lecture forms a part of the project “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”, which RNH organises in cooperation with AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, whose patron was the late Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Erla Osk Asgeirsdottir, MPA and market manager at Handpoint, chairs the meeting which is open to all, with admission free.

Daniel Mitchell received his MA. in economics from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. from George Mason University in Virginia. He worked for the Senate Finance Committee and Heritage Foundation, before becoming a Senior Scholar at the Cato Institute in Wasington DC, specialising in tax matters. He has written a book about the flat tax, and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other newspapers. He is a frequent visitor to Iceland and has published papers on taxation in Iceland. He also often participates in television debates, for example about taxes on the rich:

Here he discusses tax havens:

Here he appears before a U. S. Senate committee on public spending and public debt:

Ayn Rand is one of the most popular and influential writers of all times. Her books have sold worldwide in more than 30 million copies. AB Publishing Company having published two of her best-known novels in 2011 and 2012, now turns to her most autobiographical work, We the Living (Kira Argunova in the Icelandic translation), to come out Friday 1 November 2013, edited by radio host Frosti Logason and with a postscript by Asgeir Johannesson, lawyer and philosopher: Kira is an independent and courageous girl, studying engineering in Petrograd in Russia shortly after the 1917 communist revolution. One of her friends at school is Andrei, a convinced communist, working for the secret police, Cheka. By coincidence, she meets Leo, a handsome and charming, but unemployed  and disillusioned son of a pre-revolutionary admiral, and falls in love with him. The three of them meet their fate in a time of turmoil, where life is always at stake.

Born in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd and still later Leningrad) 2 February 1905, Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum) read history and philosophy at the University of Petrograd, but emigrated to the United States in 1926 and became a scriptwriter in Hollywood—at the same time as Halldor Laxness—and a playwright, with her plays being performed on Broadway. She married the actor Frank O’Connor in 1929, but they did not have children. The novel We the Living, published in 1936, was printed in an Icelandic translation in Morgunbladid as a serial in 1949. It was filmed in Italy in 1942. The novel Fountainhead was published in 1943, became an unexpected best-seller, and a film was made after it in 1949. The novel Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, and also became a best-seller. Rand’s play, The Night of January 17th, was performed at the Icelandic Broadcasting Service in 1966 and 1994. For most of her adult life, Rand lived in New York, passing away there 6 March 1982.

On the occasion of the publication of We the Living, RNH, in cooperation with AB Publishing Company, holds a public meeting Friday 1 November at 17.15 in Askja, the Natural Sciences House of the University of Iceland, Room N-132. Dr. Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute in California, will discuss Rand’s philosophy and argue that self-love is both right and moral. Born in Israel in 1961, Brook was brought up by socialist parents, but when sixteen, he read Atlas Shrugged and rejected socialism. He served in the Israeli Army for three years, in military intelligence. He completed an MBA and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas in Austin, taught finance in universities and set up an equity management company with associates. He became director of the Ayn Rand Institute in 2000.

SUS, the Association of Young Independents, co-sponsors the event. It also forms a part of the joint project of RNH and AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists of “Europe of the Victims”. Admission is free, and after the meeting there will be a reception on the premises. Before Dr. Brook’s talk, a short trailer from the Italian film based on We the Living and produced in the 1940s was be shown. Dr. Brook recently published the book The Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. He is a frequent contributor to television. Here he speaks about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis:

Two distinguished lawyers, Jon Steinar Gunnlaugsson, former Supreme Court Judge, and Helgi Ass Gretarsson, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iceland, will discuss a special tax on the fisheries at a meeting organised by Logretta, the Association of Law Students at Reykjavik University, Tuesday 29 October at 16, in the meeting room M-103 (the court room) at the University of Reykjavik. Gunnlaugsson has publicly argued that a special tax on the fisheries is unconstitutional, whereas Gretarsson does not agree with him. At the international conference held by RNH and the School of Social Sciences at the University of Iceland 14 October, Professor Ragnar Arnason argued that a special tax on the fisheries is inefficient, not least while the fishing sector is competing with similar sectors in other European countries—non-taxed and often heavily subsidised. Gunnlaugsson and Gretarsson will however discuss the legal aspects of the special tax, not least in the light of the Icelandic constitution and the legal framework of the fisheries. RNH supports and publicizes this meeting as a part of the joint project with AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

Born in 1977, Helgi Ass Gretarsson received his law degree from the University of Iceland in 2005 and was admitted to the district court bar in 2006. He is a Grand Master of Chess, and an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iceland, specialising in property rights. He has published two books, Rettarsaga fiskveida (The Legal History of Fishing, 2008) and Thjodin og kvotinn (The Nation and the Quotas, 2011).

Born in 1947, Jon Steinar Gunnlaugsson received his law degree from the University of Iceland in 1973. He was a district court and Supreme Court lawyer, until he was appointed a Supreme Court Judge in 2004. He resigned from the Court in 2012. In 2002–2004 he was Professor of Law at the University of Reykjavik. He has published three books, Deilt a domarana (Arguing with the Judges, 1987), Um fordaemi og valdmork domstola (On Precedent and the Limits on Court Authority, 2003) and Um malskot i einkamalum (On Appeals in Torts, 2005).

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson gives a lecture on the Icelandic bank collapse at a breakfast meeting organised by the Swedish think tank Timbro in Stockholm Tuesday 29 October 2013. The lecture will be in English and is titled “Why Was Iceland Left Out in the Cold?” It forms a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

The abstract of the lecture is the following: “As described in the famous dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians, international politics has often meant the rule of the strong over the weak. Here, a modern example will be considered, that of Iceland in the 2007–2009 international financial crisis. In September 2008, the American Fed announced currency swap agreements with the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian central banks, essentially issuing a license to those banks to print dollars. The request of Iceland’s Central Bank to be included was rejected. In October 2008, the British Labour government closed down the two Icelandic-owned banks in England, on the same day that it announced an immense rescue package for all other banks in England. Moreover, the British government used an anti-terrorism law to freeze the assets of one of the Icelandic banks, briefly even putting the Icelandic Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance on a list of terrorist organisations, alongside the Al-Qaida and the Talibans. What explains the refusal of the American Fed to include Iceland? Was the foreseeable collapse of its banks meant to be an elimination of unwelcome competition in European financial markets, as well as a lesson and a warning? Was the British Labour government under pressure from Labour-controlled municipalities which had deposited large sums of money in accounts in the Icelandic banks? Was the ferocity of the British response to the Icelandic crisis because the British authorities expected the Icelandic banks to behave like Lehman Brothers which had transferred enormous amounts of money to the US just before its collapse? Most importantly, what does this example tell us about the rules really applying in international affairs, in a dispute between the strong and the weak, an Athens and a Melos, in the midst of a grave crisis?”

Urban Bäckström, the Governor of Sweden’s Central Bank in 1994–2001 and presently the Director of the Swedish Employers’ Association, will also give a talk at the breakfast meeting. An economist by training, Bäckström worked in the Ministry of Trade, as the Chief Economist of the Moderate Union Party and later the Shareholders’ Association, and as the Secretary of the Ministry of Finance during the Swedish financial crises of the early 1990s. As Central Bank Governor, he had to tackle the impact on Sweden of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He was for two years director of the Scandia Life Insurance Company where the Icelandic corporations Kaupthing and Burdaras were shareholders for a while.

Photo: Birgir Isl. Gunnarsson.

Friday 25th October 2013 will see the 14th annual conference on the social sciences, held at the University of Iceland. The conference is called “Thjodarspegillinn”, The Mirror of the Nation, and it is an opportunity for researchers in the social sciences to present their findings. At a seminar in Haskolatorg, HT-101, 9–10.45, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson will deliver a paper on “Explanations of the Icelandic Bank Collapse.” He will argue that the explanation for the collapse offered by Ha-Joon Chang, Robert Wade and Sigurbjorg Sigurgeirsdottir, amongst others—that it was an example of a failed “neo-liberal” experiment—is not backed up by sufficient evidence. According to Gissurarson, the evidence strongly suggests a fundamental change occurring in the Icelandic economy in 2004 and one of the three main business groups being mostly responsible for the sudden and indeed enormous credit expansion in the following years, until the bank collapse. Gissurarson will also discuss the foreign aspects of the collapse, such as crucial decisions made by the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the British Financial Supervisory Authority, but most importantly by the British Labour government. His paper is a part of the joint AECR-RNH project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism.”

At a seminar in the main building of the University, room 220, 11–12.45, Professor Gissurarson will then, with one of his students, Helena Ros Sturludottir, present another paper, “Different Nations, Shared Experiences: The Baltic Countries and Iceland.” He will discuss the relationship between Iceland and the Baltic countries when they were occupied by the Nazis and the communists and the treatment of the history of those countries in Icelandic textbooks. He will describe the lecture tour on Soviet Russia which the Latvian Jewess Liba Fridland undertook in Iceland in 1923, the debate between the Lithuanian refugee Teodoras Bieliackanas and Icelandic socialists in 1946, Icelandic publications about the fate of the Baltic nations under communism, and the visits to Iceland by the Estonians Dr. August Rei and Johannes (Ivan) Käbin. Gissurarson’s and Sturludottir’s paper is a part of the joint AECR-RNH project on “Europe of the Victims: Remembering Communism”. The research on it was conducted in cooperation with Unitas Foundation in Estonia and the Occupation Museum Association of Latvia which are working together on a EU-supported project, “Different Nations — Shared Experiences.” Both seminars are open to the public, and admission is free.