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

Not much better in Romania, they're cutting salaries by 25% across the board to save costs. Greece is getting a big loan now though, about 18-20 billion euro for now, it'll help a little short term at least but its gonna be decades before its ever returned, if it does at all.
The World Bank is going either have to wipe a huge chunk of debt off of a lot of industrialized countries or come up with a new system to replace the monetary one (which will never happen, the market is tailored to it as we all know).

The crisis is far from over, in fact; timidness in the market, decreased product volume all over the world due to layoff's and cuts and overall laughable interest rates (yes, good for you but the banks that are already hurting in the anus aren't making any money) both commercial and residential will ensure it stays like this for a good while longer. It might even get worse before it gets better.

UK has its own set of problems. They need to cut a huge portion of their spending to start reducing their deficit, which will effect government programs and that usual leads to some unhappy folks. Were talking at least 7-8% of spending. Fortunately the UK like the US is lucky enough to have central banks which can buy up some of the debt, so they are far better off then a country like Greece.

You gotta be kidding. Every country knows that there are tricks to borrow money even if you can't afford it and fix the numbers to fool the public. It's Greece' fault they got into this situation and no one else's.

Actually Greece should be punished for fooling the whole EU by fixing and hiding their deficit. Now the crysis is perhaps punishment enough for them, and I have sympath with the innocent Greeks, but let's not blame others for a corrupt society's faults.

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 am not kidding you, Greece had already confirmed this information as true, just type into google and find it for yourself. Goldman Sachs using swaps helped mask Greeces huge debts for a very long time.

and don't be naive. Hiding money of a country is not something a a highschooler can do and get away with it. I'm not so sure if you shouldn't put in the same league as Enron.

its a sad day =/...hope the best for them.

The Greeks are in a lot of trouble. This bail out gives them some time, like a couple years, but in the end they are going to have to default or restructure some of this debt. The reason they got the bail out is due to chain reaction it would cause if Greece was forced to default. Country's like Spain, who are also are running big deficit compared to their GDP would then see a run on their banks. Pretty much if Greece fails people will start to lose confidence in the Euro and everyone will take their money out the bank system in these country's and stick it in German bonds. At this point Germany is really holding the EU together, at least economically. If the Germans pull out of the Eu its going to be a disaster for for the rest of the country's in the EU.

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.

this is bad. real bad. i blame corrupt GOV.