2.09.2010

Goldman rats helped Greece cheat EU stability pact

Is there a financial crisis that Goldman Sachs didn't help create?

Just days after the New York Times tells us Goldman Sachs caused the AIG collapse, Germany's Der Spiegel tells us that Goldman helped Greece hide huge deficits.
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. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.

[...]

Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt.Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn't exceed 60 percent.

The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.

Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. [...]

But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.

This is typical of Goldman Sachs' "financial innovation." They create financial transactions which have no economic value but serve to hide their clients' true financial situation from regulators, investors, and/or counterparties. Then they collect a huge fee and they're long gone by the time the whole thing blows up.

Read the whole thing and decide if "financial innovation" is a good thing or if we'd be better off tarring and feathering these bastards and running them out of town.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it is like jesus did.trow the bastards and money changers aut of the temple

Happy Super Tuesday!