It turns out that the buffoons at Surrey County Council had £20m in Icelandic banks -- wow! sorry we're flying over the Alps right now and they look stunningly beautiful -- and will undoubtedly claim that they could not possibly have foreseen the problems on the way. Yet...
By March this year the situation was so worrying and so widely known, it was even featuring in the Daily Mail. On 16 March 2008, reporting on risky banks, they wrote:
[From Burning our money: How Were They To Know?]
What the article says is that "Credit insurance for debts at Iceland's biggest bank, Landsbanki, is priced at 610 points while that for Kaupthing is priced at a hair-raising 856. Given that these two have taken billions in UK retail deposits, it may be a sobering thought for savers to consider where they are putting their cash. These banks are now seen as the most unsafe in the developed world."
So it looks to me that they had a few months to get their money out of there and put it under the bed or in the Nationwide or something. For goodness sake Kingston -- get your noses out of The Guardian's public sector jobs supplement and pick up the odd copy of the FT or something.
[posted with ecto]
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