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Originally Posted by Crawford
LOL; then there will be no major banks in the Eurozone.
Notwithstanding the Times' bias, IMO the banks did nothing wrong. They did their job.
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Well, you are wrong. This is just top of the iceberg, it is just started.
Also after last economic crisis which BTW US banks created out of theirs greed, how I understand that, EU banks lost huge amount of the money because of the fraud from US banks on Wall Street. US taxpayers didn't payed that, but EU taxpayers.
So after all it is business, US banks and US business need to ask himselfs, who will believe them after all, who will made business with them in future after all?
Of course if EURO goes down, all in Eurozone will lost big money, so I suppose response will be harder and bigger like example. Mark my words, Eurozone politicans MUST play hard on this, or they will have consequences on next elections. Merkel in Germany and especially unpopular Sarkozy in France cannot afford to play games with this. Of course they are able to play games with public, but not long before they will have to pay it with rent. So I suppose they will not play games, so someone will pay for all this.
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Merkel Slams Greek ‘Scandal’ as Attention Turns to Goldman Role
Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it would be a “scandal” if banks helped Greece massage its budget figures, as attention turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s role in Greek efforts to conceal the size of the country’s deficit.
“It’s a scandal if it turned out that the same banks that brought us to the brink of the abyss helped fake the statistics,” Merkel said in a speech in northern Germany late yesterday, without naming Goldman Sachs directly. Greece “falsified statistics for years.”
Merkel’s comments came as her government questioned whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most profitable securities firm, helped Greece hide its deficit as it struggled to comply with European Union limits. Michael Meister, financial affairs spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said Feb. 15 that a swap agreement managed by New York-based Goldman Sachs in 2002 “broke the spirit of the Maastricht Treaty.”
EU regulators this week ordered Greece to disclose details of currency swaps after an inquiry by the country’s Finance Ministry uncovered a series of agreements with banks that it may have used to conceal mounting debts. The swaps were employed to defer interest payments by several years, according to a Feb. 1 report commissioned by the Finance Ministry in Athens.
Merkel’s remarks, made during a 30-minute speech to party supporters, followed opposition from within her coalition to providing any financial aid for Greece. Horst Seehofer, leader of her Bavarian allies, said yesterday that “not a single euro” should go to Greece from Germany.
‘Sensible Budget’
In her speech, Merkel linked the euro and a constitutional amendment passed by Germany last year to reduce its own budget deficit.
“Just as Germany is trying to set down a sensible budget policy, we expect of other countries in the euro group -- and I say that specifically with a view to Greece -- that they pursue the same policy,” Merkel said in Demmin, in her home state of Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania. “In this economic crisis, you can’t live beyond your means.”
Officials in Athens have committed to reduce the budget shortfall from 12.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, the EU’s biggest, to 8.7 percent this year. The government of Prime Minister George Papandreou has pledged to slash the gap to the EU limit of 3 percent in 2012 by cutting spending, freezing wages, raising taxes on items such as alcohol, and cracking down on tax evasion.
Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said on Feb. 16 that the government was “ahead of the target” in its deficit-reduction plan, even as European finance ministers agreed the government will have to take more measures to cut its deficit if it fails to satisfy the European Commission next month.
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