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  • 2016-02-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Iceland Forgives Entire Population of Its Debt? (en)
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  • On 29 January 2016, the web site Disclose TV published an article that was rife with sensational and misleading claims, chief among them that the country Iceland had forgiven its entire population of (mortgage) debt, but a total US media blackout prevented most Americans from learning about this remarkable turn of events that had taken place three years earlier: There were two major problems with the above-referenced article. First, Iceland did not forgive the debt of its entire population. Second, there was no media blackout imposed on U.S. news outlets about covering the financial crisis in Iceland. The source of this story was a 2012 news broadcast on the Spanish-language network TeleSur. Disclose TV likely chose this Spanish-language broadcast in order to enforce the idea that a total US media blockout had prevented American new outlets from covering the story, which simply wasn't the case. Sources as diverse as Bloomberg, Think Progress, NPR, and the Washington Post all reported on this issue well before 2016. While it's true that searching ICELAND FORGIVES ENTIRE POPULATION OF MORTGAGE DEBT on Google in February 2016 yielded few results from the United States, that wasn't because of a media blackout. One reason for this phenomenon because the issue was three years in the past at that point. Another reason was because the claimed event simply didn't happen: Iceland never forgave its entire population of all their mortgage debt. Reports from 2012 (many of which were written by U.S. media outlets) noted that while Iceland forgave a large amount of mortgage debt in order to boost the economy's recovery from a financial crisis, this action did not entail entirely wiping out all home mortgages held by all citizens of Iceland. Rather, it involved forgiving a portion of some mortgage debt that was tied to inflation: As Bloomberg noted, the mortgage debt forgiveness program reportedly only affected about a quarter of Iceland's population (and given that the home ownership rate in Iceland in 2012 was 77.9%, it's likely that far more than that proportion of the population was carrying mortgage debt): The Washington Post's Wonkblog took a more skeptical view of the matter, opining that the Icelandic government's mortgage relief policy hadn't done much more than undo a portion of a serious financial problem that their bizarre laws had made much worse in the first place: Or, as one online commentator on the issue observed: (en)
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