Robert Reich: How Goldman Sachs Profited From the Greek Debt Crisis
It would violate TOS to say what I would like to see done to this sociopath.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/31368-focus-how-goldman-sachs-profited-from-the-greek-debt-crisis
The Greek debt crisis offers another illustration of Wall Streets powers of persuasion and predation, although the Street is missing from most accounts.
The crisis was exacerbated years ago by a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldmans current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt, and in the process almost doubled it. And just as with the American subprime crisis, and the current plight of many American cities, Wall Streets predatory lending played an important although little-recognized role.
In 2001, Greece was looking for ways to disguise its mounting financial troubles. The Maastricht Treaty required all eurozone member states to show improvement in their public finances, but Greece was heading in the wrong direction.
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 swapa complicated transaction in which Greeces foreign-currency debt was converted into a domestic-currency obligation using a fictitious market exchange rate.
As a result, about 2 percent of Greeces debt magically disappeared from its national accounts. Christoforos Sardelis, then head of Greeces Public Debt Management Agency, later described the deal to Bloomberg Business as a very sexy story between two sinners.
For its services, Goldman received a whopping 600 million euros ($793 million), according to Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over from Sardelis in 2005. That came to about 12 percent of Goldmans revenue from its giant trading and principal-investments unit in 2001which posted record sales that year. The unit was run by Blankfein.