If Italy Tanks, then...
- Thread starter Alfie
- Start date
Wout said:
Actually you're absolutely right - similarly with Greece, hence this article from SITN this week - it's jobs for the boys - The Boys from Bilderberg... and if the other little PIIGIES fall guess who's going to fill those influential government positions?
http://silveristhenew.com/2011/11/1...nessing-a-central-bank-takeover-of-a-society/
Can't believe when I was a kid Funkadelic's 'One Nation Under A Groove' would have been so forward-thinking... only DEBT wasn't the particular unifying 'groove' (or more aptly 'rut') I had in mind at that tender & carefree age...
VRS
x
I'm not surprised that Goldman Sachs is interested in Italy.
In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up 2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.
Goldman took a huge loss on the trade.
Is Goldman that stupid?
Goldman is stupidlike a fox. The deal was a con, with Goldman making up a phony-baloney exchange rate for the transaction. Why? Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Their game: to conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman's fake loss was the Greek government's fake gain. Goldman would get repayment of its "loss" from the government at loan-shark rates.
The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.
Cool. Fraudulent but cool.
But flim-flam isn't cheap these days: On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter billion dollars in fees.
When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, they opened up the books and Goldman's bats flew out.
Investors' went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt. Greece's panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof.
Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance? Goldman.
And those rotting bags of CDS's sold by Goldman and others? Didn't they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds? That's Goldman's specialty. In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a "net short" position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.
