Women's Hour on Radio 4 will broadcast my interview with the fabulous female Icelandic financier Halla Tomosdottir today (Friday) between 10.15-10.45. I was in Reykjavik two weeks ago and met a stunning bunch of articulate, focussed women -- furious that their country and their lives had been compromised by a small bunch of almost exclusively male wideboys. The wild risks these bankers took have resulted in three commercial banks being nationalised and the country being effectively frozen out of foreign exchange markets. But at least two smart women saw it coming -- financiers Halla Tomasdottir and Kristin Petursdottir set up Audur Capital in 2007, recruiting mainly women, and determined to exercise risk awareness in their choice of investments. according to Halla, "Our ground rule was simple. We won't invest in anything we cant understand." Since then Halla helped commission a report, published six months ago, which warned the Icelandic premier and Gordon Brown that Iceland's financial model was unsustainable. Now Audur capital is the only financial company left in Iceland with funds and with a staff recruitment programme.
Meanwhile my own private obsession with the Arc of Prosperity (well alright I'm writing a book on it) continues with a trip this weekend to Stavanger. Its about to hand over the baton as European City of Culture and the redoubtable (and Caithnessian) Mary Miller has made a fabulous job of it. Weirdly the online weather suggests it will be minus nine here in Scotland and plus 3 degrees up the fjords.
Ain't life strange. Here are the photos to prove it.
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