Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, a member of the RNH academic council and the institute’s academic editor, gives a lecture at a conference on social sciences at Bifrost University Friday 3 May 2013. The title is “The International Financial Crisis and the Collapse of the Icelandic Banks”. The following extract can be seen on the conference website:
Several Icelandic and foreign authors, including Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade, have published accounts and explanations of the Icelandic Bank Collapse in the autumn of 2008. In this paper, against some of these authors, it is argued that the Collapse was a direct consequence of the international financial crisis, but that there were additional sources of risk found in the Icelandic situation, mainly the immense size of the financial sector relative to Iceland’s GDP and the extensive cross-ownership of indebted companies. Alternative explanations such as that the Collapse was a consequence of a “Neo-Liberal” experiment in Iceland, do not seem as persuasive.
Professor Gissurarson’s lecture is in Panel 1 in the Glanni Room at Bifrost, held from 13.30 to 15.00. Other participants in Panel 1 are Professor Olafur Th. Hardarson, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Iceland, Professor Hermann Schmitt, and political scientists Eva Heida Onnudottir and Dr. Eirikur Bergmann. Professor Gissurarson’s lecture forms a part of the joint project by AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, and RNH on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.
