In 2008, Iceland collapsed under the weight of its banking industry’s federal-reserve like excesses.
In 2018, Iceland’s is a red hot economy. The highly able population has shifted from finance to technology and tourism. No bailout—allowing the banks to collapse and a natural recovery take place—has a lot to do with it.
“… rather than stepping in with taxpayers’ money like the British and Americans did, the Icelandic government let its banks go bust.”
Likewise did Chile cope reasonably well with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history.” We hear nothing of Chile’s struggles to recover.
Not so Haiti, the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.
Haiti is forever convulsed by political and natural disasters. It remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT).
It’s nearly two decades since a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. The US government granted Salvadorians a generous grant of privilege in the late 1990s, in the form of a temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000.
Ditto the “Haitians who were stranded after an earthquake in 2010.”
To the din of protest, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had only recently revoked the so-called temporary protection (it lasted nearly 2 decades).
“Shithole countries,” a Trump coinage, don’t seem to recover very well from disasters, natural or man-made, do they?
SEE RELATED READING:
“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)”
“Why Trump Pooh-Poohed ‘S-ithole’ Countries (Part 2)”
UPDATE (7/9/018):
Meanwhile in Haiti ...
