As DataMarket‘s Money:Tech gig (see previous entry) approaches, we’re starting to see all sorts of interesting data coming together to form our “DataMarket on the Icelandic Economy”.
Some graphs just speak for themselves. Here’s one that caught my eye today:
The numbers are millions ISK.
Note that these are only deposits in Icelandic banks and their immediate branch offices, not the subsidiaries of Icelandic banks registered elsewhere. It therefore only includes Icesave (UK and Netherlands) and a minority of Kaupthing Edge’s operations (Finland, Norway, Germany and Austria). See here.
We’ve marked the month Icesave is opened (UK branch). Another interesting breaking point in the graph is in early 2008. Guess what? Icesave Netherlands was started in May 2008. So, just before the crash – foreign depositors held more than half of “Icelandic” deposits (1,710 billion ISK out of a total of 3,123 billion)!
In our upcoming tool, users will be able to view and correlate a wealth of Icelandic economy time series and mark them with events and news headlines interactively. It will be a pretty powerful tool!
hjalli.com - Hjálmar Gíslason 
I’d also like to know what happened between September and November 2003.
Tóti: The graph reflects the data as published by the Central Bank. There are no explanations in their meta-data, but probably one or two banks / financial institutions are missing from the September 2003 numbers, thus only reflecting about half of the actual total.
“So, just before the crash – foreign depositors held more than half of “Icelandic” deposits”
Guess what, just before the pending crash in UK – foreign depositors are currently holding 9x annual GDP of the UK !
Arnar: In that context Icelandic deposits of just over 2x GDP seem quite modest 🙂
Var ekki verið að aflýsa Money:Tech?
Egill: Jú, því miður. Fékk meldingu um það um helgina. Ég stefni samt ótrauður á að klára þessa kynningu og koma henni að á einhverjum góðum stað.