Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [7]
Finally, from outside, comes an explosion.
Boom!
Then another.
Boom!
AS IT IS mid-December, the sun rises, barely, at 10:50 A.M. and sets with enthusiasm at 3:44 P.M. This is obviously better than no sun at all, but subtly worse, as it tempts you to believe you can simulate a normal life. And whatever else this place is, it isn’t normal. The point is reinforced by a twenty-six-year-old Icelander I’ll call Magnus Olafsson, who, just a few weeks earlier, had been earning close to a million dollars a year trading currencies for one of the banks. Tall, white-blond, and handsome, Olafsson looks exactly as you’d expect an Icelander to look—which is to say that he looks not at all like most Icelanders, who are mousy-haired and lumpy. “My mother has enough food hoarded to open a grocery store,” he says, then adds that ever since the crash Reykjavík has felt tense and uneasy.
Two months earlier, in early October, as the market for Icelandic kronur dried up, he’d sneaked away from his trading desk and gone down to the teller, where he’d extracted as much foreign cash as they’d give him and stuffed it into a sack. “All over downtown that day you saw people walking around with bags,” he says. “No one ever carries bags around downtown.” After work he’d gone home with his sack of cash and hidden roughly 30 grand in yen, dollars, euros, and pounds sterling inside a board game.
Before October the big-name bankers were heroes; now they are abroad, or lying low. Before October Magnus thought of Iceland as essentially free of danger; now he imagines hordes of muggers en route from foreign nations to pillage his board-game safe—and thus refuses to allow me to use his real name. “You’d figure New York would hear about this and send over planeloads of muggers,” he theorizes. “Most everyone has their savings at home.” As he is already unsettled, I tell him about the unsettling explosions outside my hotel room. “Yes,” he says with a smile, “there’s been a lot of Range Rovers catching fire lately.” Then he explains.
For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency trade, as the krona kept rising. “The fishing guys pretty much discovered the trade and made it huge,” says Magnus. “But they made so much money on it that the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.” They made so much money on it that the trade spread from the fishing guys to their friends.
It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay became many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!
The rocks beneath Reykjavík may be igneous, but the city feels sedimentary: on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be