When Jared Bibler visited Iceland for the first time in 2002, he couldn’t imagine that one day he would become an Icelander himself. A native of Massachusetts in the US, he was working for an Icelandic bank when in the autumn of 2008 the country’s financial sector hit an iceberg. His stint as investigator at the Financial Supervisory Authority (FME), the regulator that sent some of the main culprits to prison, helped him discover how a country of reticent fishermen became a global banking powerhouse and then lost everything. In Iceland’s Secret: The untold story of the world’s biggest con, a mix of personal diary, travelogue and financial thriller, Bibler narrates with gusto the Scandinavian saga of a nation that briefly went mad. He tells World Finance’s Alex Katsomitros how Icelandic banks collapsed, why he left the country disappointed and what’s the next bubble that may crash.
