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The Greeks have nobody but themselves to blame for their mess. Just as we'll have ourselves to blame when we hit that point. You can't spend more than you have over extended periods of time. Of course, it's typical that they look to blame somebody else.
The Greeks have nobody but themselves to blame for their mess. Just as we'll have ourselves to blame when we hit that point. You can't spend more than you have over extended periods of time. Of course, it's typical that they look to blame somebody else.
Correct, also Wall Street and the Big Banks contributed to the mess.
They sure did, by agreeing to lend the money. But nobody had a gun to their head forcing them to borrow.
DING DING DING DING DING! If I decided to create a loan where I lend everyone $100 and they don't have to pay me anything for 10 yrs but after 10 yrs they must give me $10,000, it would be a pretty bad deal on the borrowers part. I could make a ton of money (assuming I could get the borrowers to repay), but I can't force anybody to accept the deal, they have to willingly know what's going on and borrow the money.
It's no ones fault except the borrowers, period, end of discussion!
They are the ones who asked Goldman Sachs to help cover their financial shenanigans. lmao. The people of Greece should sue their government for selling them down the river 8 years ago.
One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels. Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.
The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.
It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.
Athens did not pursue the latest Goldman proposal, but with Greece groaning under the weight of its debts and with its richer neighbors vowing to come to its aid, the deals over the last decade are raising questions about Wall Street’s role in the world’s latest financial drama.
As in the American subprime crisis and the implosion of the American International Group, financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.
In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.
Critics say that such deals, because they are not recorded as loans, mislead investors and regulators about the depth of a country’s liabilities.
Some of the Greek deals were named after figures in Greek mythology. One of them, for instance, was called Aeolos, after the god of the winds.
The crisis in Greece poses the most significant challenge yet to Europe’s common currency, the euro, and the Continent’s goal of economic unity. The country is, in the argot of banking, too big to be allowed to fail. Greece owes the world $300 billion, and major banks are on the hook for much of that debt. A default would reverberate around the globe.
A spokeswoman for the Greek finance ministry said the government had met with many banks in recent months and had not committed to any bank’s offers. All debt financings “are conducted in an effort of transparency,” she said. Goldman and JPMorgan declined to comment.
While Wall Street’s handiwork in Europe has received little attention on this side of the Atlantic, it has been sharply criticized in Greece and in magazines like Der Spiegel in Germany.
“Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it,” said Gikas A. Hardouvelis, an economist and former government official who helped write a recent report on Greece’s accounting policies.
Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal. Few rules govern how nations can borrow the money they need for expenses like the military and health care. The market for sovereign debt — the Wall Street term for loans to governments — is as unfettered as it is vast.
“If a government wants to cheat, it can cheat,” said Garry Schinasi, a veteran of the International Monetary Fund’s capital markets surveillance unit, which monitors vulnerability in global capital markets.
Banks eagerly exploited what was, for them, a highly lucrative symbiosis with free-spending governments. While Greece did not take advantage of Goldman’s proposal in November 2009, it had paid the bank about $300 million in fees for arranging the 2001 transaction, according to several bankers familiar with the deal.
Print up lots of pieces of paper that say Federal Reserve Note and hand them out and say -- "There you go. All better, now."
Even better, if they do not want to print a lot of them, just mark them up as $1 Billion each, and they could have their "problem" settled before taking a long lunch break.
DING DING DING DING DING! If I decided to create a loan where I lend everyone $100 and they don't have to pay me anything for 10 yrs but after 10 yrs they must give me $10,000, it would be a pretty bad deal on the borrowers part. I could make a ton of money (assuming I could get the borrowers to repay), but I can't force anybody to accept the deal, they have to willingly know what's going on and borrow the money.
It's no ones fault except the borrowers, period, end of discussion!
you may be right but obviously it is only your opinion and maybe not that of the Greek Government(which, yes is pretty stupid for borrowing in the first place)I personally feel Greece is at fault and should suck it up
As long as they screw themselves the same. And, as we all know, they have been equally screwed.
Unless, they haven't, in which case, they don't screw everyone - equally.
Which makes this thread title, false.
/didn't get a bailout. AHAHAHHAHH.
sort of the point isn't it. Screwed everyone including us the taxpayers, because whatever the outcome we will pay. sad as hell isn't it.
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