Will the idea and practice of the EU, a cartel with the trappings of democracy: the Jean Monnet brainchild with the help from Americans, be able to survive without the continuing support of the IMF? Trump’s Budget is just another manifestation of his Isolationism, with the help of myopic, xenophobic congressional allies like Rep. Huizenga. Never fear, the Trump fellow travelers mesh with the Neo-Confederate/Originalist, in their mutual nostalgia for a past, that they have re-imagined as somehow viable.
The Greeks are simply the latest potential victims of Trumpism, yet elided from the narrative by Rep. Huizenga, as Trump ally, is the fact that an American based investment bank/house Goldman Sachs helped another Greek government mask the real extent of Greek indebtedness. This from Spiegel Online, dated February 08, 2010:
Headline: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
Sub-headline: Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.
‘…
But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
This credit disguised as a swap didn’t show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat’s reporting rules don’t comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. “The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,” says a German derivatives dealer.
…’
Trump and his allies engage in self-serving and self-willed forgetting about the mendacity of this American corporation. No surprise that Republican Populism focuses on the malfeasance of other bad actors, yet what is instructive, is that those bad actors committed their fraud, with the active collusion of an American Investment House/Bank.
In this Financial Times Melodrama, President Trump and Rep.Huizenga act as apologists for Goldman Sachs’ mendacity, while ‘Robert Kahn, a former IMF and US Treasury official now at the Council on Foreign Relations,…’ acts as the voice of reason. Or as an apologist for what is radically wrong with an international system, still in the thrall of the Neo-Liberal Theology. The reader can just ask the question: what happened to the central tenet of that theology, the Self-Correcting Market? Is this like the belief in ‘Transubstantiation’? The object of adoration and belief ?
Final question: what can the reader think of a Greek unemployment rate of 23.1%? Catastrophic!
Political Reporter
https://www.ft.com/content/e77f3c0c-0abc-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b
Added March 17 3:25 PDT:
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