If Americans think they're doing it hard in this crisis, spare a thought for the folk in Iceland. The "Land of Fire and Ice" is close to bankruptcy because of the taste for debt, and the fact that its banks are so powerful, with liabilities worth almost 10 times the country's gross domestic product.

This is important stuff. In the US and Europe, we have regulators trying to save individual banks. In Iceland, they are trying to rescue the whole system and drag it back from the edge.

Part of the problem there is that car and home buyers there have developed a taste for debt. Many there financed their purchases using a basket of lower interest currencies, such as the Swiss franc or Japanese yen. And with the local currency, the krona, depreciating, they discovered they had a big problem.

As a result, the Government there has brought in sweeping powers over the banks and taken control of housing loans. More on this from Forbes. The Government has taken over the country's second biggest bank and sacked its directors.

And as the FT points out, it's not going to get better. Inflation there is running at 14% and interest rates at 15%.