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Spagoodle on 06 May 2010
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yanamaster said:
Spagoodle said:
yanamaster said:
Well it must be said that what's happening to the euro and to greece is the fault of Goldman Sachs as they were the company to approach Greece in 2000 offering to touch up their general fiscal results so that greece could enter the Euro zone more quickly. This procedure was carried out for a couple years and resembled what Enron did with their mark to market accounting scheme, only the other way around. Instead of adding in profits that may have not ever be realized Greece kept pushing some losses to future years so that they would be spotless in the short term.

The situation would ridiculously easy to handle if it were not for the Euro. Under normal circumstances Greece would have just devaluated their currency by some 40-50% and everything would be okay. Now they have to take the long hard way around the subject...all thanks to their impatience.

 

Thats a fair point but Greece was in on it. They still deserve some blame.

Of course, they contributed to this situation in more ways than one but it just strikes me that Goldman Sachs was exposed of doing this and as such has not received so much as a fart from a regulatory institution in the US over it.

 

In fact they came also to Poland a couple years ago offering the same deal and saying that we should look at Greece if we want proof of results. We declined them because the ministry of finance thought that it looked "dodgy" and that is a quote coming from my macro prof. who was a vice minister a the time in 2005. Currently he is a bigwig in the central europe IMF division and provides us with some very incredible news about the financial markets all over the world including the early signs of how the crisis was set into motion

I totally agree with you. Goldman Sachs deserves blame and the US needs better laws to discourage actions like what happened in Greece. The US needs a big change in how we regulate our banking system. Goldman Sachs has also done some flat out immoral things here in States as well, so I do understand why people in the EU are upset.