Icelandic government becomes first to be brought down by the credit crunch

Originally posted by loam
Pretty amazing...

Their riots appear to be quite civilized. : )

The situation in Iceland is nothing like the situation here at home in America.

If we had 70-80% unemployment, we'd be rioting too (I would hope).

The actual unemployment number is impossible to know here, but I suspect it's pretty hefty. Of course more than 7% of the workforce is out of work, the actual number has got to be at least double that, in real terms, when you consider the official number only includes those people collecting checks from the government, not those whose eligibility expired, those who were never eligible, or those who simply had no desire to go on the dole.

There is no way of calculating the real number based on the data collected by the government, and there has been zero effort on the part of NGOs or charities to come up with a workable figure based on surveys.

So, it's all guesswork.

The sense I get though is that no more than a quarter of the eligible workers in this country is without work. That's still a huge percentage, but it's nothing like what Iceland is experiencing.

What should amaze people and make them stop and think is just how quickly it all went bad over there. There are lessons to be learned...

In just a few short months everything went sour, and nobody was prepared for it.

England next trust me the proud people of this country have been # on long enough, a revolution is coming