If there’s one thing you don’t want to be, it’s the next Iceland.

Since its currency, colossally indebted banking sector and economy collapsed in spectacular fashion in October, the country has become a byword for an economy that has truly hit the rocks.

Within weeks, banking problems and currency falls meant Hungary was being hyped as a “second Iceland”, at least until a joint International Monetary Fund and European Union rescue package restored some stability.

Next to win the unwanted comparison was Ukraine.  Having lost at one stage half its value, the currency has somewhat stabilised — although most foreign investors are very hesitant to hold Ukrainian assets again.  And like Iceland itself, Ukraine is now dependent on an IMF lifeline.

Now, it is Britain in the limelight.  The New York Times as well as Britain’s Observer and Daily Telegraph newspapers have all made the comparison in recent days.

For people earning and saving in sterling, it is an uncomfortable place to be and nervousness is to be found in the strangest of places.  During a recent visit to a podiatrist, a Reuters correspondent found the conversation punctuated with speculation about the possibility of an IMF bailout for Britain and angst over cutbacks in the National Health Service footcare budget.

Business bosses, it seems, are as much in the dark as the investors who buy stocks in their companies.

That is the worrying conclusion of a new survey from Booz & Co. 

After quizzing more than 800 senior managers, it found 40 percent doubted that their company’s leadership had a credible plan to address the economic crisis and an even higher number - 46 percent - were not sure that their top management could carry out the plan, credible or not.

Alarmingly, even at the CEO and board level, one third of those responding were sceptical of their own plans.

“It appears that the speed with which the crisis hit and the subsequent volatility has left many senior leaders uncertain of how to move forward and whether they should be in survival or opportunity mode,” says Booz partner Jake Leslie Melville.

But despite not being sure what to do, senior managers are clinging on hopefully. More than half of those questioned thought the crisis would ultimately have a positive impact on the competitive position of their companies.

George Alogoskoufis is a hardly a household name outside Greece and EU financial circles. But the newly sacked Greek finance minister could yet become a poster child for politicans struggling to fight off economic decline and banking industry collapse. His demise was in large part due to a public perception that he was helping out the banks but ignoring rising joblessness.

Greece, of course, is a special case at the moment, still recovering from riots over the police shooting of a teenager. But finance ministers, central bankers and other responsibles are probably not immune from Alogoskoufis Syndrome. Balancing the need to bail out the finance industry with rising economic misery among everyday people is not easy. Fat cats are not exactly in favour at the moment.

This could, indeed, come to a head later in the year. Investment cycles tend to recover before economic ones. So what happens when Wall Street, the City and the like start bringing in the money again just as unemployment lines start getting even longer?

Goldman Sachs is previewing the 2009 outlook from a light hearted perspective. “We hope readers take these thoughts in the spirit that they are meant and don’t take any offence at any of the contents,” reads the disclaimer.

The year starts with an interesting twist in the UK, where Chelsea Football Club releases a letter written to incoming US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, asking whether if they signed David Beckham, would it make them eligible for TARP funds?

In February, Russian Prime Minister Putin declares that the American word recession would not be translated into Russian.

In March, President Obama announces an initiative for his infrastructure projects. Any ex Wall Street bankers that succeeded in building bridges and roads in half the planned time would be eligible for special bonuses to help keep them in the lifestyle they were used to.

In July, in yet another “who could have dreamt of that” event, Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Daimler, Fiat, Volkswagen, and Peugeot, merge into one company, to be named “Worldcarco”. Toyota says they expect their share of the global auto market to be higher than that of Worldcarco.

In August, Chelsea, now under the ownership of the US Treasury, announces that they would no longer play football in the UK, but are joining the NFL in the US. Manchester City, having been relegated from the Premiership in May, say they are looking forward to the new season, and to prove their status as the world’s wealthiest football club.

Towards the end of the year, the Finance Ministers of the four BRIC countries meet for the first time and announce that they would not attend the IMF annual meetings. In a follow up statement, the BRIC Finance Ministers say that they are considering inviting the G7 countries to occasionally join them as members of a new “out reach” group.

Mike Trudel, U.S.-based managing director and senior product specialist at BlackRock, has become convinced the economic recession really has arrived.

When he checked into London’s hip upmarket hotel Sanderson earlier this week, the staff uniform caught his eye.

Hotel staff were wearing black T-shirts, with RECESSION written in big letters in front. They highlighted SI in red – like this:

RECESSION

“It read as recession is on. If folks in Sanderson know about it, it’s no secret anywhere else. That’s how awful it is,” he told a group of journalists at BlackRock’s London office.

However, Trudel thinks it’s time to get back into stocks. BlackRock’s Global Funds in which he is involved are overweight on stocks at 63 percent of the portfolio, underweight bonds at 29 percent and overweight on cash at 8 percent.

Thirty-first U.S. President Herbert Clark Hoover once said: “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”

Governments around the world are borrowing heavily to finance their fiscal expansion – unprecedented in size and scale – to prevent severe economic downturn.

However, outspoken independent economist Roger Nightingale thinks fiscal stimulus will not work.

He predicts a severe, Japanese-style recession to hit major and developing markets.

“There is no way out of this problem. Fiscal policy won’t help it at all,” he told a conference in London.

“It’s taking from one type of people and giving it to another… It’s net zero. It’s taking from non-banks and giving to banks. It’s taking from the innocent and giving to the guilty. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.”

A day after Britain unveiled a multi-billion-pound fiscal stimulus package to spend its way out of recession, market analysts have been busy figuring out what it all means, in the context of a sharply slowing economy.

Nick Parsons, head of market strategy at nabCapital, has come to this conclusion:

“People need to spend less, not more, and though little Johnny’s Xbox is indeed 4 quid cheaper, his Dad’s house is worth £3.97 less every hour,”he wrote in his daily note.

“That’s every hour of every day, 24 hours a day and is not going to get in the slightest bit better as a result of yesterday’s budget announcement… Thanks to the VAT reduction, Easter eggs might be 10p cheaper next year but by then average house prices will be another £10,000 cheaper. Go figure.”

Financial markets might be in distress and stocks are falling through the floor, but according to James Montier, global strategist at Societe Generale, we are not in the final stage of bubble burst yet. For one thing, the Financial Times is still too big.

At a fund managers conference in London today, Montier — a renowned bear — noted a thesis by economists Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger that bubbles go through five stages — displacement, credit creation, euphoria, critical stage/financial distress and revulsion.

Currently, he says, financial markets are going through the critical/distress stage but we are not in revulsion yet.

“In revulsion, the Financial Times will be three pages long and we will all be ashamed to be working in finance. Stocks will be unambiguously cheap,” he told a group of financial professionals.

Malcolm McLaren, the man who gave us The Sex Pistols, has found the real punks — bankers. In an interview with Britain’s The Observer, he says punk was not just about spiky hair and ripped t-shirts.

“It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that. It turns out that the bankers may have been the biggest punks of all.”

McLaren says we are now at a transformative moment.

“We’re at the end of the culture of desires; we may be going back to a culture of necessity.”

God Save The Queen

Every month, the financial services company State Street studies the trillions of dollars in institutional investor money it looks after as custodian and tries to gauge where things stand. Over the years, it has come up with a map consisting of five different regimes, or moods, to reflect this. They range from the bullish “Liquidity Abounds” in which investors buy equities and focus on growth, to the uber-risk averse “Riot Point”.

Guess what? Investors moved into “Riot Point” last month after flipping about for four months in the slightly less bearish but still risk averse “Safety First” regime. This essentially means that they gave up in October – which is not a particularly stunning finding given that many stock markets had their worst performance in decades.

So now comes the bad news. In the 11 years State Street has been drawing its map, the longest period of risk aversion as measured by investors being in “Riot Point” or “Safety First” was the nine months between February and October 2001. This almost exactly coincided with the then-U.S. recession.

State Street gently points out that the U.S. economy has yet to formally enter recession this time.