“People seem to forget,” wrote economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich in a column that was widely circulated in a variety of forms over the last few days, “that the Greek debt crisis ... grew out of a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein.”
Perhaps, especially in the U.S., and paradoxically, especially in the last year or so, as the Greek financial crisis again churned its way into the news cycle, people forgot — but in Europe, and even in the U.S. press at various times over the last 14 years, the deep, dark connections between Greece’s debt and Wall Street derivatives markets have been, if not top-of-mind, always close at hand.
Under the rules governing the euro, the Greek economy was really carrying too much debt to join the European common currency (this was back in 2001, a couple of years after formal trading in euros began). But a team from Wall Street investment giant Goldman Sachs saw a way around that pesky Maastricht Treaty stuff, and the Greek government, excited by the prospect of reinvigorating their small, shaky economy, were eager to sign on.
