Where Men are Men
Boom! Boom! At night one hears the explosion of cars and SUVs bought during the recent bubble. Owners who can no longer afford their vehicles are demolishing them in order to collect the insurance. The owner of a $35,000 Range Rover might owe $100,000 on it. As Michael Lewis (author of Panic
Lewis says you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats foreigners at the point of entry. In Iceland just one “All citizens” sign welcomes Icelanders and visitors alike. This confirms the idea of Icelanders as nice, friendly people. It’s not that simple, however, as Lewis found out. Icelandic males go crashing into each other or into unsuspecting foreigners for seemingly no reason at all. “Everywhere I walk Icelandic men plow into me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just for fun.”
The don’t bash into women, fortunately, but they also don’t talk to women much, creating tension in social situations where both are present. Although women here have equal rights, Icelandic men and women appear to live in different worlds, and this is apparent in their political parties. The Independence Party is mostly male while the Social Democrats are mostly female..The new Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, is a Social Democrat.
Women have important jobs in Iceland, but hardly any became bankers or hedge fund operators or traders. Many of Iceland’s financial high-flyers came from the ranks of fishermen. What brought Iceland from being one of the poorest nations in Europe to one of the richest was innovation in the country’s fishing industry in the 1970s. Fishermen were assigned quotas based on their previous catch. Those who preferred not to fish could sell their quota to someone else. One could also take one’s quota to the bank and borrow on it. Fish, writes Lewis, “had not only been privatized; they had been securitized.”
As Iceland became rich, education became a priority. The country paid students for studying abroad and increasing numbers of Icelanders earned Ph.Ds. Those with Ph.Ds really had nowhere to go until the country turned to investment banking.
Meanwhile, though, in 2004, Iceland turned to a new industry, smelting aluminum, seemingly a natural because of the rich store of thermal power under the ground. The aluminum plants needed workers who would follow the rules and do what they were told, however, this was not a job description that fit the Icelandic male. An Icelandic fisherman is a competitive risk-taker, following in the path of long revered heroes of the Sagas, and now even the fishermen were well educated. It was almost inevitable that they would become investment bankers and hedge fund managers.
Making money looked easy, and for a while, it was. Money was easy to borrow for currency trading and buying up foreign assets. The trouble was, those new to the game often paid too much for the assets they bought and didn’t take time to analyze what they were buying.
Where were women in all this? Nearly all avoided jobs involving risk. One, Kristin Petursdottir, who was deputy CEO of a major bank, hated the culture and called it a “pool of sharks.” She quit to start a financial services company run by women. After the crash, it became one of the few surviving financial firms. Even men now come to her as customers.