The Anglo Disease as experienced in the USA seems qualitatively different due to the dollar's role as a reserve currency.
IANAE, but my take on that is that the US used the dollar's status as reserve currency to inflate its financial sector, where the UK used a much more aggressive policy of being a tax shelter flag of convenience country.
I'll leave it to the economists to hash out whether that's a qualitative difference.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Iceland, OTOH, has abundant energy resources. And the UK has a number of markers it could surrender in the European political game in return for help with its energy issues. Ireland... well, they're not quite as far in the hole as the UK, at least to judge by what I read on ET. Being a much smaller economy located much closer to a functioning economic zone is both a blessing and a curse that way...
The fundamental, underlying logic is the same. The political and economic fallout, and the specific way it was implemented are not.
"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
With the economy going to hell, I'd say the people of Iceland will be pretty happy they'll still have the aluminum industry left, especially as I've heard the guestworkers have been shipping out because of the currency collapse: their wages aren't that high anymore in real terms.
So the Karahnjukar project should be a good thing now, if Alcoa doesn't fuck them over somehow. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The fact that they were one of the central players in Pinochet's coup doesn't precisely do wonders for my confidence in their willingness to do well by Iceland either. AFAIK, they were never seriously punished for that story.
We'll just have to wait and see. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
