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Merkel Slams Greek ‘Scandal’ as Goldman Role Examined

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it would be a “scandal” if banks helped Greece massage its budget, as European officials investigate Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s role in Greek efforts to conceal the size of its deficit.

“It’s a scandal if it turned out that the same banks that brought us to the brink of the abyss helped fake the statistics,” Merkel said in a speech in northern Germany late yesterday, without naming Goldman Sachs directly. Greece “falsified statistics for years.”

Merkel’s comments came as her government questioned whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most-profitable securities firm, helped Greece hide its deficit as it struggled to comply with European Union limits. Michael Meister, financial affairs spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said Feb. 15 that a swap agreement managed by New York-based Goldman Sachs in 2002 “broke the spirit of the Maastricht Treaty.”

Bloomberg

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza

@alfonso_forex

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