Why should you care about Greece’s debt issue? It’s simple really: Goldman Sachs bought up billions of dollars of Greece’s debt in a lot of small deals that paid derivatives, adding up to millions of dollars of profit. Goldman Sachs is one of America’s largest publicly traded investment banks that was bailed out to prevent a meltdown of the United States’ financial economic system. If Greece is allowed to fail, Goldman Sachs will lose billions, if not trillions of dollars, risking insolvency, thus resulting in the collapse of the banking system that finances the entire globe.
Now for the bad news: this is just the tip of the iceberg. Goldman Sachs has written more than $2 trillion in insurance to numerous banks around Europe and has an undisclosed amount of money invested in many other European countries.
Countries sell bonds to raise money to finance their policies. Bonds are simply a promise to the buyer that the country will tax its people to get the buyer its return on the investment. In this way countries sell their sovereignty. Goldman Sachs mandates that profit must dictate all policies. European Union states are not allowed to monetize their debt, i.e. buy their own debt, because they are all working under the same currency.
Without this financial tool, states were desperate to sell stocks to the highest bidder. With Goldman Sachs being deemed by the U.S. government as “too big to fail,” they didn’t have to worry about any particular states default because they were already guaranteed by their own government not to sink. So, Goldman Sachs went around purchasing democracies on the open market like any other commodity such as corn, oil or lumber.
So what happens when countries like Greece and Italy fail to implement austerity programs and their countries can’t come to terms on their own? Simple, the current Prime ministers are required to step down, and technocrats, like Mario Monti and Lucas Papadermos are appointed to the position of prime minister to dictate austerity reforms in their absence.
Lucas Papadermos was the chairman of Greece’s central bank and worked closely with many ex-Goldman Sachs employees to broker the sale of Greece’s debt and futures. He is now the appointed Prime minister of Greece. This would be the equivalent of having America go bankrupt, Obama being forced to resign and appointing Ben Bernanke, current chairman of The Federal Reserve Bank, president of the United States.
Mario Monti was Italy’s Secretary of Treasury and an international advisor to Goldman Sachs from 2005 until a couple of weeks ago when he was nominated to replace Silvio Berlusconi as Italy’s Prime Minister. This would be the first ex-Goldman Sachs Prime Minister, effectively allowing them to have an insider on Italian economic policy, monetary and fiscal. This would be similar to appointing Timothy Geithner president.
A Goldman Sachs connection is found within almost every European country’s financial sector and as of Nov. 1 Mario Draghi, ex-director for Goldman Sachs International, is the president of Europe’s Central Bank.
Italy and Greece, which have seen their democracies effectively hijacked by technocrats, are to be the world’s first official corporatocracies: corporations, government entities and other private components direct the countries and set their economic policies. If strictly looked at  from an economics standpoint we can justly discern the people in these countries will not be looked at as people or citizens anymore; they are simply human capitol.
Goldman’s commodity interests are among the largest in the world and now they may add the citizens of Greece to the list of commodities under Goldman control. Stephen Foley of The Independent writes that Goldman’s plan is “to create such a deep exchange of people and ideas and money that it is impossible to tell the difference between the public interest and the Goldman Sachs interest.”
Isn’t there something morally wrong with that? Do the people of Greece really owe Goldman Sachs a dime? The taxpayer financed bailout was the government action that enabled Goldman Sachs to go out and buy up debt from European countries in the first place. It was the 0.01 percent interest rate loans that the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank gave to Goldman Sachs in order to make the risky debt deals. Goldman Sachs did so with the premise already set by the American government that they were too big to fail; that it would continue to be bailed out by the middle and working classes of America if Greece and others did in fact default.
This is the same bank that has received more money in subsidies and tax dollar bailouts than any other investment bank, which they used to exploit others’ plight around the globe. The same Goldman Sachs bankers who unloaded billions of dollars of “crappy” securities to their own clients, evaporating retirement plans, pensions and 401ks, all the while doubling down against those “crappy” securities to create personal fortunes for themselves. So we shouldn’t be surprised. If Goldman Sachs views people as a commodity, it is only natural that they would assume direct control of the political process as well.
Why is Greece important? I contend that globalization is an economic fact and with that acknowledgement comes the understanding that America is not exempt from the power of global financiers; the international technocrats.