Comments by "seneca983" (@seneca983) on "The Greek Debt Crisis - 5 Minute History Lesson" video.

@ez4039 : "Goldman did them a favor extending credit when others wouldn’t." I think you misunderstood a bit. Goldman basically helped Greece to "cook the books" and pretend they had less debt than they actually had in order to meet the requirements to join the common currency.
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: Even if Goldman's primary purpose is to make money for its investors, we should be able to expect it to operate within certain ethical boundaries. Helping Greece defraud European institutions is at least a bit suspect.
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That's good to hear.
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@cliffsousa4184 : "They are also the ones who shorted MBS during 2008 recession." But this isn't actually harmful.
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@cliffsousa4184 : Yeah, I agree selling bad CDOs and misleading investors (though credit raters share the guilt here as well). But the shorting part isn't harmful. In fact, the problem (at least in hindsight) was that people valued CDOs too highly. It would have been better if there had been more people shorting them.
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To add to the answer Randeep Mann gave, Wikipedia says that Eurostat didn't include cross-currency swaps in debt statistics before 2008. When this changed in 2008 other countries did start to report their swaps (as Greece wasn't the only one to use these kinds of arrangements) but Greece didn't and claimed it didn't have such swaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#2010_revelations_and_IMF_bailout
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To me, it seems that Syriza did more market-oriented reform than New Democracy.
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