Tag Archives: iceland

Stacy Summary: Some Wikipedia troll who clearly doesn’t know what they are talking about has deleted all sorts of content relating to some of Max’s predictions. This guy commented about our 2007 film, Money Geyser, for example – “Same with saying “Gosh, Iceland relies on hot money and is kind of precarious” in 2007, given that pretty much everyone had been saying that since 2006.”

This is a load of bollocks. I did the research for that film in March 2007 and the single only source I could find that said Icelandic banks were overleveraged was a Dutch bank. Max refers to this single naysayer in the film during his questioning of the Kaupthing bank economist. The fact is we went to Iceland to investigate how they were buying up much of the UK high street because not one single newspaper in the UK said anything was unusual about it. There were a few comments about the Russian mafia, but none of my research turned up anything about the carry trade. It was only when we arrived in Iceland and spoke to bankers there and witnessed the economy that Max drew the conclusion that he suspected it was the carry trade and predicted it would end up like Thailand.

Here is a UBS research paper from DECEMBER 2007, seven months after we made our film. In this paper UBS says Kaupthing bank is the second most efficient in Europe. And that they believe Icelandic banks are a great investment going forward and that they will continue to grow. Notice they make no mention of any concerns about the carry trade or an imminent collapse in the krona or the Icelandic banking system as we had made in our Aljazeera film that had aired months earlier. This completely contradicts the incompetent editor’s comments that EVERYONE knew Iceland would crash in 2006. Find me one single mainstream media source anywhere online that says that. If not, can someone please make changes to the Wikipedia?

The troll also comments, “Yeah, the “predictions” section is pretty terrible. Saying “Lehman Brothers is in deep trouble” in July 2008 is not exactly a brilliant “prediction,” given that the stock had already lost like 80% of its value at that point.” The prediction relating to Lehman Brothers, however, had nothing to do at all with the stock price or the collapse of the company. The dingbat would know it if he had read the Huffington Post article Max wrote relating to Lehman Brothers, titled – Peek-A-Boo Accounting and the Crash of Financial Stocks on Wall Street – you see that Max CLEARLY knows the financial stocks are collapsing so that is not the frigging prediction, the prediction was that Max predicted accounting fraud in the Huffington Post blog dated July 2008; ONLY TWO YEARS LATER in March of 2010 did we learn it was Repo 105 accounting fraud, a fraud that works exactly as Max predicted in his piece on the Huffington Post two years earlier. Granted, the prediction isn’t as interesting as some others, but the point is that the guy who trolled this is just plain wrong.

Anyway, Wikipedians don’t allow you to make changes on any entry relating to you; so if you want to fix these obvious incompetencies and outright falsehoods. And there are plenty more.

Oh and Max does NOT have Russian parentage. Whatever bozo put that there is wrong. He’s obviously from German ancestry and Scottish. The Germans arrived in 1732 from the Palatinate. And the Scottish arrived during the Revolutionary War from Northern Ireland via Caerlaverock Castle where his great, great, great, etc. grandfather, Hugh Maxwell, was born.