Vanity Fair a long story online about the meltdown of Iceland’s economy. It’s a facinating piece about how a famously reticent, frugal people managed to create a financial bubble that is certain to go down in the history books alongside the Holland tulip craze. Although the author throws in some snarky digs at free market economics, the real reason is that the Icelanders had basically nobody in their government or banking system who understood high finance:

There’s a charming lack of financial experience in Icelandic financial-policymaking circles. The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet. [Prime Minister Geir] Haarde, though, is a trained economist—just not a very good one. The economics department at the University of Iceland has him pegged as a B-minus student.

Just how cut-off from the rest of the world are the Icelanders? Well …

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.”