It makes me crazy that, in all the focus on Greece, nobody mentions Goldman Sachs

just another instance of the banksters dodging accountability (and criminal prosecution) and being enabled to do so by our news media who choose to look the other way...

spiegel reported on this over 18 months ago...

How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules.

greg palast gives us a timely reminder...

In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up €2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.

[...]

Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Their game: to conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman's fake loss was the Greek government's fake gain.

Goldman would get repayment of its “loss” from the government at loan-shark rates.

The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.

[...]

In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a “net short” position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.

But, instead of cuffing Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein and parading him in a cage through the streets of Athens, we have the victims of the frauds, the Greek people, blamed. Blamed and soaked for the cost of it. The "spread" on Greek bonds (the term used for the risk premium paid on Greece's corrupted debt) has now risen to — get ready for this––$14,000 per family per year.

when i'm at home (wherever that might happen to be at any given time), i virtually never listen to news on the radio or watch it on tv, preferring to get all my news from multiple internet sources... however, when i'm out driving around, i usually listen to npr and have been known to start screaming in the privacy of my truck while listening to multiple stories on greece none of which EVER mentions the goldman connection... what can be said about that kind of omission except that it's a blatant media cover-up...?

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