"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!"
Let the old gentleman send all cetaceans in Icelandic waters to whale heaven, kill off all our livestock, and our good minister surely won’t have to fork out money for nothing no more.
In 2005, approaching the peak of the Icelandic banking miracle, the country’s president, Dr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson - a chief cheerleader when it came to touting the skills of Icelandic bankers at making money from nothing, as they travelled around buying up assets with borrowed money - famously warned the world about their ingenuity saying: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
This came true - though not exactly in the way Grímsson had imagined - when the entire Icelandic finance sector went bust overnight three years later, and much of the banking elite ended up behind bars.
Bank coffers now empty, Grímsson, a gentleman not for turning, took on a new cheerleading role, this time in the most important fight of our times, the life-or-death battle against nice weather, sometimes also called climate change.
The other day my morning paper reported on the front page how our Minister for the Environment had “saved” the nation some 450 million ISK by paying “only” 350 million for nothing, in “fines” for failing against some climate catastrophe goal or the other, instead of the 800 million government officials had erroneously budgeted for earlier. If that isn’t making money from nothing, I don’t know what is. (I only hope he doesn’t play the lottery, or he might be in for personal bankruptcy every week.)
Turning the pages, the next story I noticed was on the claim of an elderly billionaire who has made it his hobby to lose money on whaling, of how important this hobby was in the battle against climate change. Each whale caught would otherwise emit some 28 tonnes of CO2 annually, he explained. Something a non-existent whale of course doesn’t do. He then went on to describe the environmental importance of slaughtering livestock. By every cow slaughtered we save the CO2 it would otherwise emit for the rest of its life, he said.
Following this line of reasoning, we can now solve two problems at the same time. Let the old gentleman send all cetaceans in Icelandic waters to whale heaven, kill all our livestock, and our good minister surely won’t have to fork out money for nothing no more. Instead, the rest of the world will have to pay us; we’ll be making money from nothing once again, as we did with Icesave at the time.
And just like the Icelandic bankers, exporting their Midas touch of making money out of thin air in 2005, we will of course export this brilliant new solution to the rest of the world. We will obviously recruit good old Grímsson to handle the marketing. And when explaining the ingenuity of killing off the world’s entire fauna to save the planet, making more money on climate quotas than we will ever be able to spend, he can dust off the old slogan: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
I had to read this twice! And read the newspaper articles.
The whole world has gone mad. We have been pushed through the mirror and are definitely just waiting for the White Queen, the Cheshire Cat and HumptyDumpty to turn up.
I might start telling your government that I have unused CO2 credits they can buy if they want - I can also sell them small green things which breathe in CO2 and which they can even eat if they wish (although they are quite expensive).
Absolutely mad (and I always thought you Icelandics were interestingly sane!).
There's very few Rumpelstiltskin Ponzi scammers who can successfully spin straw into gold. It seems most are sustainability grifters who control trillions at asset management firms, hence have the power to micromanage societies thus can conveniently predict outcomes which are completely intentionally planned.🤔