[2] On December 12, 2008,[3] by legal act 142/2008, the Icelandic parliament established an investigation commission to, in the words of the law, 'seek the truth behind the events leading to, and the causes of, the downfall of the Icelandic banks in October 2008, and related events', 'granting the Commission 'exceptional investigative powers in order to appease the demonstrators and to meet the public's demand for answers as to why their three largest banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki, and Kaupthing, had collapsed'.

[5] On December 30, the three members of the commission were appointed, being people 'with impeccable reputation': Supreme Court Justice Páll Hreinsson, who served as chairman; the Parliamentary Ombudsman Tryggvi Gunnarsson; and Sigríður Benediktsdóttir, associate chair in Economics at Yale University.

The report turned out to be a detailed description of failure, incompetence, and mishandling, often with shocking direct quotes from SIC interrogations of major government figures or business leaders'.

[10] The report was turned into a 'computerized textual mash-up ... resulting in a 65 page long poem' called Gengismunur (“Arbitrage”) by Jón Örn Loðmfjörð; in the assessment of Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, the poem 'deals with and represents the banality (and hilarity) of the language surrounding the crisis, the politics and the market'.

[11] It has also been seen by Norðdahl[12] to have inspired Sindri Freysson's Ljóðveldið Ísland: 65 ár í 66 erindum við þig.