More about bankers.

[johnny9fingers]

My Chum, Posh Stephen, sent me these two wonderful links today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/global/14debt.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/greeks-beware-of-goldman_b_462928.html

It makes you wonder, really.

One of the things I wonder is do the Greek folk have, um, any action which they can take? Sure, the Greek Government has been doing dodgy things....but could not have done so without the help or assistance from the very wonderful Goldman Sachs.

Derivatives....helping those CO's and CEO's and investors in apparent economic distress since well before Enron. Either that or in the more complicated versions, outright fraud? Creative mathematics is such an impressive subject.

Now, subtract the number you first started with....and you're left with.....

Obviously, it's all Obama's fault.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmmm. The Greek people having action they could take - well, they could stop striking for more pay and stop expecting higher pensions than their economy can afford and so on - this problem did not develop overnight. Developing a sense of proportion and blunting any sense of entitlement would be a good start.

That's not to say that the government isn't blameworthy in all this - telling people decades ago that what they wanted could not be afforded, and putting up with the resultant toys-out-of-the-pram fuss would have helped - but when a country is about to be bailed out by the IMF and its citizens are still taking to the streets to shout about how they're not paying for the mess, but they were very happy to take advantage of the health care and the pensions and the benefits and the sinecure government jobs that were created by all this borrowing, one wonders if one's slipped through some form of rabbit hole to a place where cause and effect no longer apply.

The same applies to the derivatives argument. The main reason for the really dodgy ones being made in the first place was to allow banks to lay off the risks associated with lending to people who could not afford to pay the money back - Goldmans did well at this because they could see that it was likely to blow up, so they sold the risk to anyone who was blinded by the dollar signs but they did not do it in order to screw people over, they did it because they could see that it would most likely be profitable for them, and they have no duty to anyone other than the shareholders.

One can argue that the subprime mortgage recipients should not have been lent the money in the first place, but surely a basic grasp of arithmetic should have led those who were taking out the mortgages in the first place to realise that this might have been a bad idea. The banks were responding in large part to the desire of people to get into more debt than they would ever be able to repay because they felt that they had a right to home ownership, dammit. Shelter is a basic human right, not owning one's own home. Again, this is not me trying to absolve the banks of all blame - they should have known better - but when did we get so stupid that we have to rely on banks to tell us what we can and cannot afford, be that personally or as a government? When did banks agree to be our moral guardians - and do we want our moral wellbeing in the hands of bankers?

There's a clue to all this in the first sentence of your first link by the way - "akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America".

To be honest, I'm surprised that you think that people should not be forced to think about things and take responsibility for their own bad decisions. It's all a bit paternalistic and patronising. Blaming the banks for the stupidity of their customers is just mad, be it governments or the man on the Clapham omnibus.

M

[winterlion.livejournal.com]

I think that creative accounting goes back a while - but for national govs it's Reagan, Thatcher and co ;)

Corporations have been doing this ... for a while...

[shoarthing.livejournal.com]

Unexpected input from an offshore source:

http://baumanblog.sovereignsociety.com/2010/02/beware-of-greeks----and-goldman-sachs.html