International Monetary Fund | League of Bloggers For a Better World

The President of Iceland, Dr. Olafur Grimsson, is interviewed in this video by Ms. Oksana Boyko on RT’s “Worlds Apart”. Dr. Grimsson does not come across like the average politician. Instead he is a statesman.

This is an excellent interview which describes the events which the country of Iceland and President Grimsson faced, as well as all countries which have privately owned central banking systems, in the year 2008 when the worldwide financial crisis negatively affected the national economies of the Earth.

President Grimsson describes an “almost revolutionary situation” in his country, which threatened the 1,000 year-old democracy of Iceland. He says that “banks and markets have an enormous democratic responsibility in every country”, and that if the citizens of Iceland had accepted austerity-if they had decided to pay for the failures of private banks-the citizens of Iceland would have had to pay for that decision for decades.

He describes how his decision to hold a referendum, to allow the average citizens of Iceland to decide their future, was the most difficult decision he had ever made. He asked himself who was more important-banks or people-and decided to trust the people, who gave their trust to him. All the while he faced down the negative views and judgments of the status-quo telling him, and the people of Iceland, that their country would become a “pariah state” and suffer extreme isolation.

The issues discussed in this interview go to the heart of problems faced by the people of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United States (not austerity-but the kinder, gentler “sequestration”) and other nations.

The people of Iceland, led by President Olafur Grimsson, have provided the ideal model for every other country now suffering under the same harsh austerity measures that Iceland, with 98% of the people in agreement, voted down.

The people of Iceland, by an overwhelming majority, chose democracy and human rights over banks.