its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—

resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to

decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are

men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly

Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectiv ely went bust, I spoke to a man at

the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Rey kjav ík to determine

if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland,

knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with

famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another.

Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’

2008 Human Dev elopment Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized

themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history . “Y ou hav e to

understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country . It is a hedge fund.”