Just finished reading a great article on the Vanity fair website, where they go into detail about why Iceland's banking collapsed so spectacularly in October last year. I particularly liked this extract:
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two
problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its
giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or,
to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders,
steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely
believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a
government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no
elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an
Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare
the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a
position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”
I'm from the government and I'm here to relocate your elves. The full article can be read here.
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