Let’s restate that, because it gets more shocking the more you think about it. The bailout money came from the European Central Bank and the IMF, largely meaning the taxpayers of France, Germany and other prosperous nations of Western Europe. Exactly none of it went to restore social services or repair roads in Greece. All of it was used to make payments on the Greek government’s existing debt — most of which was to banks in Western Europe. So Angela Merkel and François Hollande (then the French president) and other political leaders extorted money from their own taxpayers, on the pretense that they were helping out a small, struggling nation on Europe’s southern fringe, and siphoned it directly to the biggest European banks, largely in their own countries. It was a direct wealth transfer from ordinary people to the financial elite.
Tag Archives: Great Recession
Study: Top Bank Execs Saw the Crisis Coming and Sold Their Company’s Shares | naked capitalism
Would be shocking if we didn’t already know that it was true.
So much for the “whcouddanode” theory of the crisis.
Source: Study: Top Bank Execs Saw the Crisis Coming and Sold Their Company’s Shares | naked capitalism