This post is about the shadow banking system. When the practice of securitization and off-balance sheet lending and special-purpose investment vehicles and unchecked leverage and so forth collapsed in the great unwinding of 2008, the nation of Iceland, thanks to its hyperactive and hubristic group of banks, was left with a ruined, worthless currency and a mountain of debt. The utter wreck rendered by the innumerate speculators who has seized control was enough to make Carles skeptical of the entire educational system: "Wonder if their educational systems are helping out, or if they just have arts&crafts programs instead of ‘math.’" As Carles notes, "they started to build some sort of ‘imaginary reality'," in which they could operate the entire country as a giant, aggressive hedge fund without the participation or consent of ordinary citizens. Carles points out that "While that is good for 1-5 artists [read Glitnir, Landsbanki, and Kaupthing] who become successful, I can’t help but stereotype the rest of the population as being ‘zany’ and ‘ppl who wear weird clothes.’"
With the collapse of the bankocracy, however, those marginalized citizens have no other option but attempt to reorient the island's economy in a more plausible direction. On this point, Carles isolates the recent election of a gay prime minister as a metaphor for the future of the country's economy as it inverts itself and attempts to cash in on its alleged ethnic homogeneity. "Not sure if I really ‘believe’ that she can turn the Icelandic economie around. Heard that it is really in the shitter because Iceland doesn’t produce anything valuable for the world." What is value? Is it the product of mimesis, a kind of "homosexual" production, or is it the product of assimilating opposites, the "heterosexual" mode? Can an economy become bisexual? Does the Icelandic economy need queering to reproduce its radical otherness as a kind of accessible familiarity to the international community? Carles speculates over whether the election portends some larger frenzy of self-referentiality: "I wonder if they think that ‘I will be the next Bjork’ and neglect cultivating functional skills that will contribute 2 society." In short, the "artistry" of the country's young turk bankers provoked a rejection of the "natural" economy dictated by its geography, but it remains unclear to Carles whether the gay prime minister will represent a rejection of "natural" proclivities (figured by the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality) or a return to such natural proclivities (figured by homosexuality as a kind of metaphor for self-love).
bravo
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