"In Greece, he says, the government initially disguised the true state of its finances with the help of U.S. bankers. Goldman Sachs, for example, did off-market currency trades with the government of Greece.
"[Those trades] enabled the Greek government to book upfront a big profit, but down the road [the Greek government] would have to repay Goldman Sachs quite a bit," Lewis says. "So [Goldman Sachs] lent the government money without saying that's what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they'd be admitted to the euro[zone].
(...)
This was not a one-off situation," he says. "You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk."" [npr.org]
"[Those trades] enabled the Greek government to book upfront a big profit, but down the road [the Greek government] would have to repay Goldman Sachs quite a bit," Lewis says. "So [Goldman Sachs] lent the government money without saying that's what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they'd be admitted to the euro[zone].
(...)
This was not a one-off situation," he says. "You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk."" [npr.org]
No comments:
Post a Comment