I claimed the other day, from memory, that the Landesbanken plus Deutsche had dumped EUR35Bn in the Iceland crash. That’s a spectacular claim, but unfortunately not at all true.
A bit of polite throatclearing from commenter Hubert got me to dig through the bankruptcy wind-ups of Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki. Based on a wikileak of Kaupthing bankruptcy claims, the Landesbanken barely feature, as far as I can see. Deutsche has some big claims in against Kaupthing (around $7Billion out of $40Billion, before the overclaims are tossed out), but one can’t just apply a haircut and guess the loss from that; there is usually some double counting in the claims (bankruptcy claimants tend to operate on the principle that if you don’t ask, you don’t get). The aggregate claims against all three Icelandic banks total $85-$95Bn, far larger than their on-balance sheet liabilities, and probably for all sorts of reasons besides overclaims from creditors. There is no public breakdown of claims against Glitnir and Landsbanki, so maybe there are some Landesbanken in there, but still, it’s hard to believe I’ll find the difference I need…
Oh well. I’ve got the beginnings of a post-mortem piece on Iceland at any rate, which I can polish in my own time (and, um, fact check).
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Very honest of you, Yves. Anyone can make a mistake, after all, but few bloggers (or people in general) go back to correct them.
I’m the other one. Reminds me I must think about putting a byline at the top.
Sorry, Mr. Smith. So I suppose I need to issue a correction to my comment concerning your correction. :>)
hum… Sorry Richard… but can’t find anything regarding WikiLeaks… Congratulations to Mr Julian Assange… Through the Gullible, Stupid and Crazy eyes of the American people is our corrupt goverment; We Americans should be up in arms screaming and demanding the resignation of many Diplomatic Officials… Myself in my life time, I do konw our Corrupt Government do and undo… good, bad to evil with Criminal Intelligence, support actions world wide… oeganizations… countries… governments… dead to human personalities… and disrupt, I can go on… and on… and on!!! in the name of what?.. ‘Asking’ where are you Americans?.. where’s human dignity… Our government is to protect it’s people… to help it’s people to make peace with other nations and not to overthrow other governments… see Iraq…We the US are masters in FAILURE and DEFEAT of Wars… yet we have our previous ‘Heat Hunter’ and now ‘Wrinkle Two Face Bimbo’ Hillary Clinton as our Secretary of what!!! Criminal Intelligence… promoting crime! world wide… Myself I am very frighten that Mr. Julian Assange may be order to be banish.
I’m not sure what your beef is. We’ve put a number of links regarding Assange in Links, including ones re his expected bank, presumed BofA, release. We pointed to that out the first day that story surfaced, perhaps you missed it.
Clearly this “Hubert” cannot be allowed to publicly leak such sensitive data. I strongly suggest you place him on the terrorist watch list.
And quit apologizing. It lends you too much credibility.
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If you’re careful in your writing, when you get your Iceland postmortem finalized, you can just change the “c” to an “r” and you’ll have the Ireland story finished too!
Good on you for at least correcting it.
Z
Cheers Richard. (& nice one jaymaster!)
I seem to remember that Deutsche Bank had billions in Icelandic Banks but not seen anything recently.
most of deutsche’s involvement in iceland was intermediation. i.e. db bought in their own name, but only because they had a matching total return swap with a hedge fund client.
this should mean that deutsche did not have a lot of net exposure to iceland, although given the shoddiness of their documentations department in getting swap confos accurately worded and properly executed, i wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of its hedges turned out to be unenforceable.