Outrageous But Legal: EU Knew Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Use Derivatives to Conceal Deficits

Outrageous But Legal: EU Knew Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Use Derivatives to Conceal Deficits
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Bloomberg
reports:

Greece turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2002, just after adopting the euro, to get $1 billion in funding through a swap on $10 billion of debt, Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece's Public Debt Management Agency at the time, said in an interview last week. Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, was aware of the plan, he said.

This is like your local bank ignoring video footage of a mortgagee borrowing money from a loan shark to make a down payment. Clearly, the EU should have more closely analyzed this financial engineering given the high risk use of derivatives to manage critical sovereign debt.

Outrageous ... But Legal.

What do you think of Goldman's dealings with Greece? The EU's knowledge? Share your thoughts in the comment section below...

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