Quote:
Originally Posted by Osem
I know, I posted a link about that dating from 2010 above and they needed help to pull it off. We all know they've been living well beyond their means for decades and they probably hoped EU/Eurozone membership would ensure that their excess would eventually be paid for by others. As it stands they're probably right too because I think a lot of debt is going to be written off in one way or another.
|
They didn't need any help. They were doing all of it themselves. All Goldman Sachs did, as other banks have done with other EU countries, is carry out the Greek government requests of a certain type of financial transaction. The loans arranged that way were for £2.8billion, that is a drop in the ocean for Greece. Whether it went on the books or not, was purely down to the Greek government. The same goes for all the other fiddles, eg publicly owned companies running up massive debts on behalf of the government.
Quote:
Then Goldman Sachs came to the rescue, arranging a secret loan of 2.8 billion euros for Greece, disguised as an off-the-books “cross-currency swap”—a complicated transaction in which Greece’s foreign-currency debt was converted into a domestic-currency obligation using a fictitious market exchange rate.
...
In the late 1990s, JPMorgan enabled Italy to hide its debt by swapping currency at a favorable exchange rate, thereby committing Italy to future payments that didn’t appear on its national accounts as future liabilities.
|