Few people in the remote Norwegian town of Narvik, 200km north of the Arctic Circle where the sun has -disappeared until January, were likely to have given a lot of thought to the credit squeeze sweeping the global money markets - that is, until it threatened their wages over Christmas.

Narvik, along with the three other similarly isolated towns of Hemnes, Rana and Hattfjelldal, has become the latest to discover just how directly even the most remote places can be affected by the financial -turmoil after municipal authorities made multimillion-dollar bets on complicated US-linked financial products.