[ptaipale]

Agreed, the Iceland comparison is a red herring that is repeated often but which completely bypasses how different the Iceland economic crisis was.

Iceland never had much deficit. It has a healthy public economy. Iceland had a boom of financial industry which then went bust, but it wasn't a significant part of the country's real economy.

When the banks went bust, foreign customers who lost money in the crash insisted that Iceland, the country, should compensate. The government felt they didn't, because it was not the Icelandic government that was in bankruptcy. And that was fine.

The public deficit in Greece (and, to lesser extent, Portugal, Ireland, France, Italy and now Finland) is a very different problem.