Icelandic Reuters/Bloomberg correspondent, Omar Valdimarsson, had a story published today which highlighted some of the differences between Iceland and Greece.
Here are some of the interesting stats from the story:
+ Credit default swaps on five-year debt issued by Iceland narrowed to 376.4 basis points on April 30, compared with 817.5 a year earlier, according to Bloomberg data.
+ That compares with an April 30 CDS of 718.5 basis points for Greek debt versus 156.2 on the same contract one year ago.
+ Iceland’s gross debt will be equivalent to about 160 percent …

If you follow news out of Iceland and you’ve not heard of the volcanic eruption of the past few weeks then what rock have you been living under?
There’s not a minute goes by within a new tweet about it.
And they keep on flowing.
English language media in the country (The Reykjavik Grapevine, Iceland Weather Report and Iceland Review) have jumped on the volcano bandwagon to varying degrees. While most have provided great coverage (The Iceland Weather Report), I’d argue Reykjavik Grapevine has come out on top. Just watch out for Ice …

We received a comment from Ice News in response to one of our posts about volcano coverage. We thought it’d be good to hoist it up for all to see. Thanks for taking the time to respond Alex. Appreciated.

The vast majority of IceNews volcano stories are purely news items – as is true of all our articles.
The occasional advertisements are easy to spot and do not impact upon our news service at all.
IceNews is consistently one of the most visited Iceland news websites in English and usually breaks new stories …

The chairman of David Hale Global Economics?
It’s David Hale.
And he’s suggesting Iceland takes prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to help alleviate the financial crisis they’re in.
“The US could show its appreciation to Reykjavik for hosting prisoners by allowing its banks to join the troubled asset relief programme. The US Treasury could cover the cost of repaying Iceland’s retail deposits in the UK and the Netherlands with just one-half of the profit it made on its Goldman Sachs shares. As the prisoners come primarily from Afghanistan, they would probably prefer Iceland’s cooler …