It was a victimless crime. The people were making money hand over fist and didnt WANT to know how as long as the checks kept coming. People with that kind of money to invest arent stupid, on some level they knew, or should have known that what was happening didnt make any sense.
Same goes for Greece. When they were launching fireworks over Athens for the Olympics and eveybody was raking in tourist dollars and partying in in the streets nobody asked how Greece was paying for it. Certainly the Greek people werent volunteering to pay more taxes, they just thought some kindly old magic Jew was giving them a bunch of free money.
Say what you want about Goldman, but there was no gun to the head in this instance. The biggest deception here was how the Euros lied to themselves for a decade.
At some level the victims of Madoff should have known it wasn't real, but IT DOESN'T MEAN MADOFF ISN'T A CRIMINAL!
And it was a victimless crimes in EXACTLY the same way that Madoff was a victimless crime. Just because the crime wasn't obviously immediately DOESN'T MEAN IT WASN'T A CRIME!
Your blindness on this issue is exactly the same as a guy I met who was working in a Bangkok boiler room. He justified stealing the life savings of pensioners by saying they deserved it for being so stupid as to trust him. An Italian overheard this and came over and bitchslapped him into a grovelling heap on the floor. Which would be a good start for the entire financial "industry"
Im not saying a crime hasnt been commited. On the contrary I contend that multiple crimes have been committed by various parties.
- The Greek government issued bonds knowing it had no means of ever paying anything back. Thats larceny.
- The Greek people dodged taxes at every opportunity and voted in governments which would toss benefits around like confetti until the whole house of cards collapsed. Thats embezzlement.
- Goldman aided and abbeted Greece in obfuscating their financial situation. Thats accomplice to larceny.
- Finally the western European countries were grossly negligent in vetting new entrants to the Union. Anybody who spent a day in Greece should have known it had no business trying to join an economic Union on equal footing with Germany or France. They didnt ask questions because they didnt want to know the answers.
Crimes have been committed. Im just not sure who the victims are. Certainly not the Greeks.
So its the fault of some Greek olive farmer that he didn't study international finance and stop wasting his time farming olives and instead spend his time to prevent it happening? Its his fault that his local hospital can no longer afford pharmaceuticals? He's not a victim of the austerity that shuts down his kids' school, but a co-perpetrator?
By that reasoning there should never be a medical malpractive suit as everyone should have studied enough medicine to know when the doctor was giving bad treatment. If they didn't learn that then its their fault if they wrongly lose a leg?
It's the fault of the gimmedat receivers in greece. Productive businesses will be fine. Old people and savers will get their wealth looted Argentina style.
You dont need to study international finance to know that if you arent paying for the services you use and the benefits you recieve somebody else is in some way or another. Maybe your next door neighbor, maybe somebody in another country, maybe somebody generations from now.
As long as it was somebody else picking up the tab and not them, the Greeks were fine with it. When the Germans stopped paying his bills your humble tax dodging olive farmer started calling them Nazis.
How do you know that if all the experts are telling you its OK?
Do you learn that experts in all other fields, airplane engineers, bridge designers, doctors, dentists, nuclear physicists etc are correct or not in the womb, or is it only financial experts that you are born with this knowledge?
Im not asking him to price a long dated cross currency correlation swap, Im asking him to exercise very basic common sense.
When your country is spending tens of billions of dollars on buildings that are only going to be used for two weeks dont you look around at your fellow olive farmers, none of which pay taxes, and ask "who exactly is paying for all this"?
If you dont want to pay for them then you shouldnt be hosting the Olympics. You shouldnt be a mailman retiring at 50 expecting to collect a pension for the rest of your life when you probably havent paid in much more than $50k over the course of your career. They just all assumed that the Germans, or their kids, would take care of it for them.
To you and I that seems obvious, but to a nuclear engineer the Fukajama design probably seemed equally obviously flawed, yet to us we trusted the experts that they knew how to build nuclear plants in an earthquake zone with no risk.
To me it seems obvious that the US health care system is damaged by insurance companies participation, yet unless an American takes time out of his life to understand how health care is actually delivered they trust their experts that the system is a valid one.
You keepo blaming everyone else for not stopping what they doing, learning how international finance works to a level that they could challenge the statements of the experts and then abandon their own jobs to put a stop to it.
Since they didn't do that, but carried on working as doctors, nurses, farmers, taxi drivers, school teachers, etc. then they are co-perpetrators of the crime.
Again, to me it seems obvious and common sense that this is a ridiculous proposition. Obviously to you its not. Lets both stop what ever we're doing, put the rest of our lives to one side, and spend the necessary time studying and researching the issue to a level that we can definitely state that one proposition or another is correct and then lets abandon our careers to make societal and legal changes to overcome the entire status quo. Sound reasonable?
Most people flipping houses during the real estate boom were and types, not real estate professionals. Does that mean that they deserve a free pass because they were amatuers and that Suzannes research told them that real estate was going to go up 10% every year forever?
Flippers and highly leveraged "home owners" were greedy, not stupid or taken advantage of. In this case the Greeks absolutely knew they had no means of paying and went ahead borrowing and cashing in anyways.
Personally I find it extremely condescending to think that people arent intelligent enough to bear any level of responsibility for the choices they make where common sense is involved. Not building a billion dollar football stadium or paying 1/3 of your population as well compensated civil servants when all your country does is pick olives and fuck sheep qualifies as common sense to me.
The flippers have already taken the losses and lost everything in most cases when they bought too high.
Funnily enough the banks got bailed out for issuing the loans, even though you would think the banks would have a certain duty to know more about loans in return for taking millions in salaries and bonuses for their "expertise", but hey hoh, let's let that one slide for now.
Its in no way condescending to say that someone who has spent his entire life and career working and studying to become a neurosurgeon might not know enough about whether the design of a nuclear reactor is safe for an earthquake zone. And I don't believe that he is equally culpable for believing the experts and that its his own fault if he and his children get irradiated as he "should have known, it was just common sense" that the experts were wrong about the design of the reactor.
Warren Buffet has studied finance his entire life and he says he doesn't understand derivatives, yet you think that people in other fields should study up to a level of expertise beyond Warren Buffets in order to assess the veracity of what all the experts were telling them about their nation's finances?
Posted 2/5/2012 9:17 am
Look, you people are fundamentally misunderstanding the basic facts of First World money: IT'S DEBT. Money only gets created when somebody BORROWS IT into existence. Without debt, Americans and Europeans just wouldn't have any money, under their fiat and fractional-reserve currencies.
So what really happened was that the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) were allowed to borrow at least US$4 trillion equivalent money, so that that amount of money could then EXIST in the EU. That made the Euro-Jew bankers happy since that's what they see their job as: Creating money. And for a time it seemed like prosperity since at least US$4 trillion extra money was rolling around the EU. But it's really just DEBT, and the debt was issued to what are effectively the /\/igger nations of the EU. Eventually, it had to be noticed, then faced, that all that debt was BAD, since /\/iggers can't repay debts. That's why banks have always "red lined" /\/igger ghettos. Everyone knows that a /\/igger (or Irish or Spaniard or Greek, etc.) won't repay a debt to you. That's why they're /\/iggers.
Therefore all those trillions based on that debt were ALSO bad. So the EU started to crash; and it's still crashing, but they are trying every delaying tactic in the book, since at heart, they are just Jewish filth.
and 
types, not real estate professionals. Does that mean that they deserve a free pass because they were amatuers and that Suzannes research told them that real estate was going to go up 10% every year forever?