@kapitolai_: If you hid your debts to get a loan, that would be fraud. Goldman Sachs hid an entire country's debts, charged 600 million euros for it, and broke no law. To use the euro, a country's deficit had to stay under 3 percent of its economy. Greece joined in January 2001 on numbers that were fiction: a 2004 audit later showed the real deficit broke the limit every single year (2000: reported 2.0%, real 4.1%. 2003: reported 1.7%, real 4.6%). Greece faked its way in on its own. Goldman was hired to keep the fake alive. The trick was a currency swap. Greece's dollar and yen debt was converted into euros at a fictional exchange rate, and at that fake rate 2.8 billion euros of debt vanished from the national accounts. In reality it was a secret loan from Goldman, but under EU accounting rules of the time, swaps did not count as debt. The loophole was the product. Goldman's profit was about 600 million euros, confirmed on record by the man who later ran Greece's debt agency. And when the deal turned against Greece after 9/11, the hidden debt nearly doubled to 5.1 billion by 2005, so Goldman got paid again to restructure its own disguise. In October 2009 the truth surfaced: the real deficit was 15.4 percent, five times the limit. Weeks later, Goldman president Gary Cohn flew to Athens to pitch one more instrument, pushing healthcare debt into the future. Greece declined. What followed: over 240 billion euros in bailouts, an economy that shrank deeper and longer than America's Great Depression, pensions cut more than a dozen times, and roughly half a million Greeks leaving their country. Nobody was ever charged. The EU quietly closed the loophole in 2008, seven years too late. Greece got the austerity, the European taxpayer got the bill, and the 600 million stayed earned, because building the disguise broke no rule at all. #goldmansachs #greece #eurozone #debtcrisis #fyp

Kapitol.ai

Open In TikTok:

Region: NL

Monday 13 July 2026 07:38:10 GMT