{"id":666394,"date":"2010-02-16T12:41:13","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T17:41:13","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-10-04T10:38:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T14:38:51","slug":"wall-st-helped-hide-greeces-debt-now-its-kablooie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/666394","title":{"rendered":"Wall St. Helped Hide Greece&#8217;s Debt, Now It&#8217;s Kablooie!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/consumerist.com\/assets_c\/2010\/02\/blownupparthenon-thumb-300x165-37061.jpg?w=780\">         <\/p>\n<p>Looks like Goldman turned the Parthenon into a gunpowder magazine for a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Parthenon#Destruction\">second time<\/a>; Greece&#8217;s recently revealed debt crisis is rattling the world economy and familiar culprits are at play: Wall Street banks, off-the books loans, derivatives, and other occult financial instruments. I guess we blame the consumer on this one too?<\/p>\n<p>For instance, in a deal brokered by Goldman Sachs, Greece used swaps to trade away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds for money. Since they weren&#8217;t recorded as loans, the true size of Greece&#8217;s liabilities and deficit was hidden from bond buyers and regulators. Now the truth is out and the market has turned on its former darling.<\/p>\n<p>Hmm&#8230; sounds similar to the American sub-prime meltdown, for which the &#8220;greedy American consumer&#8221; was first eviscerated. Let&#8217;s instead hold up the banks to their supposed fiduciary responsibility. There&#8217;s a reason why cops prefer to bust dealers instead of users. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/14\/business\/global\/14debt.html?dbk=&#038;pagewanted=all\">Wall St. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe&#8217;s Crisis<\/a> [NYT]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Looks like Goldman turned the Parthenon into a gunpowder magazine for a second time; Greece&#8217;s recently revealed debt crisis is rattling the world economy and familiar culprits are at play: Wall Street banks, off-the books loans, derivatives, and other occult financial instruments. I guess we blame the consumer on this one too? For instance, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3568,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2Nmi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":767411,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666394\/revisions\/767411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}