It seems that some form of derivatives and the accompanying securitization have been involved with just about every loan of substantial sums in the 21st century - be it a loan to the guy next door or a country. Manana is the catchword. Tomorrow my house will be worth so much more, I'll be rich. Tomorrow I'll be out of office and won't have to be around when the bills come due.
The leaders of Greece wanted to join the European Monetary Union in 2001 but had too much debt on their books. So, they called on the wizards of Goldman Sachs who were able to transform the debt to currency trades and, voila, Greece met the standards of the EMU. Now why the EMU was not able to discover this - this being the fact that Greece did not meet the EMU's standards - is interesting, shall we say.
Since Greece was able to get what it wanted in 200,1 it tried it again last year when the economy went south. They paid Goldman another $300,000,000 to make the bad things go away. It does not look as though the magic worked this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment