In October 2008, as the global financial crisis shook Iceland's outsized banking system, large queues formed at banks. Reporting from 4 October in The Guardian said the lines were huge as people tried to move their savings into accounts they believed were safer. The króna was falling rapidly, and one of the country's three major banks had already been nationalised.
Iceland's banking sector had expanded far beyond the scale of the domestic economy. Deposits usually appear as numbers on a screen, but when trust in the institutions behind those numbers weakened, savers had a reason to reach a counter in person. The people in line were not chasing a windfall. They were trying to decide where their accumulated money might survive. A financial crisis had become a physical wait.