02/11/12 Weekend Watering

[Petsamo]

SPX: My preferred EW count off the October 4 low

You ought to do an EW analysis on UNG. You might be missing out on something BIG !

[SWalsh]

I've been looking at a Twitter feed about the riots in Greece on Sunday with one comment being, "Interesting that we are seeing democracy die in its birthplace". This post also caught my eye. Although 3 months old, it speaks of what is playing out now. And if true, how much better off is our balance sheet? (my two economists friends believe its contents revealed would bring about a debt implosion due to enough worthless junk residing on it for loans to banksters)

I'm not providing a link, but rather posting a synopsis by the author below. Searching for the title will find his blog is one desires. Max Kaiser has been railing against GS for some time now. They did prosecute the guy who stole some code and the judge stated that in the wrong hands it could be used to manipulate the market. These guys below? Nah....that's crazy talk.

How Goldman Sachs sacked Greece – Greg Palast, author of "Vultures’ Picnic"
Posted: November 8, 2011

Here’s what we’re told – Greece’s economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-arse Greeks refuse to put in a full day’s work, retire while they’re still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha, and they’ve gone on a social services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill is due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big, fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.

I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it because of the document in my hand marked “Restricted distribution.”

I’ll cut to the indictment – Greece is a crime scene. The people are victims of a fraud, a scam, a hustle and a flim-flam. And – cover the children’s ears when I say this – a bank named Goldman Sachs is holding the smoking gun.

In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up €2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.
Goldman took a huge loss on the trade. Is Goldman that stupid? Goldman is stupid – like a fox. The deal was a con, with Goldman making up a phoney-baloney exchange rate for the transaction.

Why? Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Its game? To conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman’s fake loss was the Greek government’s fake gain. Goldman would get repayment of its “loss” from the government at loan-shark rates.

The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece’s right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 per cent of GDP. Cool. Fraudulent but cool.

But flim-flam isn’t cheap these days. On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter-billion dollars in fees. When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, it opened up the books and Goldman’s bats flew out. Investors went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt. Greece’s panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof. Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance? Goldman. And those rotting bags of CDSs sold by Goldman and others? Didn’t they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds?

That’s Goldman’s specialty. In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDSs and CDOs – packaged sub-prime mortgage securities – Goldman held a “net short” position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting its financial “products” would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on its “net short” scam.

But instead of cuffing Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein and parading him in a cage through the streets of Athens, we have the victims of the frauds, the Greek people, blamed. Blamed and soaked for the cost of it.

The “spread” on Greek bonds, the term used for the risk premium paid on Greece’s corrupted debt, has now risen to – get ready for this – $14,000 per family per year. Why did the Greek government throw its nation’s fate into Goldman’s greasy hands? What the heck was in the “Restricted” document? And why did I have to take it to Geneva, to throw it down in front of the director general of the WTO for authentication, a creepy French banker I otherwise wouldn’t bother to spit on and then tear off to Quito to share it with the grateful president of Ecuador?

To give you all the answers would require me to write a book. I have – Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit Of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates And High-Finance Fraudsters.

It’s really quite important to me that you read it, that you get it now. That’s a funny statement, I suppose, from an author. But I really want to let you inside the investigations, to cross the continents with me and follow down the leads so that you can get a full picture of “the beasts.” The beasts and their trophy wives, intelligence agency go-fers, political concubines and bone-breakers. And besides, it’s enormous fun when it’s not scary as shit.
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