Goldman’s Great Greek Swindle and the American Blowback

Goldman’s epic swindle may topple Greece and even the European Union. Wall Street’s stranglehold on the U.S. is equally dangerous.

You’ve heard this crappy joke before. Financial vampire squid Goldman Sachs games billions on the books for a prestigious client, hiding its lack of real value, while both continue to lucratively trade on false data. Time passes, Goldman retracts its feeding tube, the prestigious client implodes, and the collateral damage escalates. Cue the cruel laugh track.

The client this time? Greece, where Goldman executed a currency swap worth billions, without reporting it of course. The collateral damage? The euro, and perhaps the entire European Union, depending on how the house of cards falls. But to be fair, Goldman couldn’t have done it alone.

“The European Union bureaucrats that are driving the system wanted their own empire,” economist Paul Craig Roberts, one-time assistant U.S. Treasury secretary in the Reagan administration, told AlterNet. “So the European Union was expanded into financially weaker states, which can no longer print money to cover their debts as they all use the euro. What Goldman Sachs did for the Greek government was to help hide the size of the Greek debt, since European Union membership requires maintaining a fairly low deficit-to-GDP ratio.”

Full Story: Goldman’s Great Greek Swindle and the American Blowback | Economy | AlterNet.