The wrong legislation (due, primarily, to there not being any RIGHT legislation) was invoked to jump the creditors queue to ensure that our own councils etc were not caught out by investing in dodgy assets -
it's a basic tenet of investment that the higher the interest rate being paid, the riskier the investment.
I doubt the tax man, for example, will accept the same moral arguments if somebody goes bust owing you money, and you go and empty their bank account prior to the tax man getting his traditional first dibs on the assets.
Iceland's fault is to have gone into the never never land of repackaging unsustainable mortgae loans, along with virtually every financial institution in the western world - and a good few kenyans who have been emailing me over the years asking for help claiming large sums of money.
I imagine the icelandic people feel a bit aggreived about it, is it any surprise to find relations still a bit on the touchy side? Were things the other way about would we be any more welcoming?
We SHOULD, obviously, have sunk them all during the Cod wars, and taken the whole mass of clinker over as a huge outdoor spa, but I don't think it's fair to get so annoyed at them this time round - if you want to blame anyone then blame the spams...they're the gits who decided to sell mortgages to thousands of people who couldn't afford a pot to pi$$ in, in rebundled packages that hid the risk from greedy salespeople.