Iceland 2008: How Three Private Banks Bankrupted an Entire Country | EP36 T1

In October 2008, the three largest banks in Iceland collapsed within seventy-two hours. Their combined balance sheet was eleven times the size of Iceland's entire economy. Three banks. Three hundred and thirty thousand people. The balance sheets were accurate. The leverage was disclosed. The funding structure was public. Nobody had modeled what happened when the wholesale funding machine stopped working for all three simultaneously.This is the financial autopsy of Iceland 2008 — the wholesale funding dependency mechanism that allowed three private banks to grow their balance sheets to ten times GDP and then transfer that entire liability to a government with no capacity to honor it. We dissect the expansion, the three public signals, the seventy-two hours, and why Iceland was not too big to fail — it was too big for Iceland to save.Iceland 2008 | wholesale funding collapse | sovereign backstop failure | Kaupthing Landsbanki Glitnir | banking crisis | financial collapse | Icesave | IMF bailout | sovereign debt | financial autopsy | bank run | credit crisis | GP LP analysis | institutional risk | fixed incomeEvery collapse has a pattern. We dissect it. Layer by layer.— Financial Forensics Labs