Michael Pascoe previews the week ahead: IMF, RBA, Questions for Malcolm Turnbull — SMH

Foreclosure Alley: What happens to the homes people walk away from — Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

Iceland just the latest nation to joing the financial meltdown. This North Atlantic volcanic island, which is the size of Cuba, with a population of 320,000 — the size of Coventry’s – is an unlikely player on the global financial stage. It is famous for its fish, geysers and for winning the UN’s 2007 ‘best country to live in’ poll. But Iceland built its extraordinary wealth on the crest of the worldwide credit boom and now the crunch is sweeping it away, bankrupting a people for whom the past eight years have been, for most of them and by their own admission, one long party. — Guardian

Eurozone struggles for unified response. [I]f the euro zone’s approach to the banking crisis is conspicuously fragmented, it is largely because it does not have any choice. Despite having shared a single market with one currency for nearly a decade, the euro zone has never established a parallel system with cross-border regulation and oversight of private banks.

“This is a wake-up call,” said Sylvester Eijffinger, a member of the monetary expert panel advising the European Parliament and a professor of financial economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. — International Herald Tribune

How bad CEOs get rich. In 2006-that was just two years ago, when Wall Street still existed-the fifth highest-paid CEO in the United States, according to Forbes‘ annual roundup, was a man named Richard Fuld. Fuld sold enough shares in his company to make himself $122 million that year. This wasn’t unusual for him: In five years, he’d reaped close to $376 million in total pay.

The company that Fuld ran once was one of the leading investment banks in the country. It was called Lehman Bros. It is now defunct.

In the annals of outrage over executive pay, Richard’s Fuld’s nine-figure payouts will occupy a fat chapter. It’s people like Fuld who make a bailout of financial companies so hard to swallow for many-and why the bailout bill comes with caps on CEO pay. How could someone who messed up so badly have gotten paid so much for doing that? — The Big Money