system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What did Iceland do to their bankers/politicians, and why haven't we done the same?
gpt
Keep in mind iceland is a country of 300k people (it's basically a mid sized city with its own currency) that had a massive banking bubble in part because of capital inflows from Europe (e.g. british pensions invested in Iceland).

By basically tossing those investments under the bus they handed the problem of much of that debt off to someone else (e.g. the british government).  Now that's not so bad when you're a country of 60 million people absorbing a few 10's or hundreds of thousands who got screwed by the banking sector.  But when you're a country of 300 million people, most of  whom are locally invested in their own country this plan is completely unrealistic.  The US can't really offload even a small portion of the debt problem to a bigger neighbour.  

In the US also, because many bankers are lobbyists and there are fairly deep ties between the various banking/treasury etc and the big US banks the US government had much more of a hand in how the crisis was managed - good or bad, and in many cases the US government induced some of the shady activities.  

Oh, and lots of things  in the 'US' banking problem actually involved people in other countries  where the US does not have Jurisdiction.  LIBOR for example is well, in London the UK.