Goldman Sachs Greece

by anderson

Wonderment.  The behaviour of Goldman Sachs is truly a wonder to
behold.  And one of the beauties of watching the most purely evil
organism on the planet "doing it's thing," is that the wonderment never
ceases.  Ever new and wondrous horizons of graft and financial
sheisterism present themselves almost daily.

The latest enumerated sin is Goldman Sachs involvement
with current financial mayhem headliner, Greece.  Not only did Goldman
knowingly hide billions in debt to help Greece gain admittance to the
EU, Goldman continued to advise the earlier governments on how to
continue to hide debt.  How did they do that?  Through new and
innovative financial instruments, of course!

Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

As
worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviewsshow
that with Wall Street�s help, the nation engaged in a decade-longeffort
to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Evenas the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching
for waysto help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early
November �three months before Athens became the epicenter of global
financialanxiety � a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient
city with avery modern proposition for a government struggling to pay
its bills,according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

Thebankers, led by Goldman�s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a
financinginstrument that would have pushed debt from Greece�s health
care systemfar into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take
out secondmortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before.In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to
Europe�s monetary union,Goldman helped the government quietly borrow
billions, people familiarwith the transaction said. That deal, hidden
from public view becauseit was treated as a currency trade rather than
a loan, helped Athens tomeet Europe�s deficit rules while continuing to
spend beyond its means.

Given what we know about the behaviour of Goldman Sach -- and granted,
this is only what we know -- it seems highly likely that Goldman Sachs
(that's GS 153.93 on your DJI dial) has made a lot of money from
Greece's hidden debt, both from the initial subversion, and the sudden exposure, and certainly from the
feeding frenzy on the Euro.

On the ground, the usual and necessary structural adjustments are exacted,
or, in this Greek case, adopted voluntarily in order to appear
serious.  (Frankly, this current government does appear to be serious. 
They were the ones who exposed this budgetary malfeasance, aided and
betted on by GS, and they know what a fuck job it has been.)   But we
all know what that means;  "belt tightening" for all but the tighteners,
lay-offs, wage freezes, closed schools, hospitals, shelters, and the
tonnes of flesh these financial parasites extract from the human realm. 
Greeks lose, Goldman and a few other players win, win, win.

How long is the world going to permit this pest to ravage so much of human space?