Goldman Sachs is carrying out a global coup d’etat
By Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks 
http://www.thomhartmann.com/tv
http://sunlightfoundation.com/

As Europe descends into an austerity-induced economic crisis, Goldman Sachs's people are managing the demise of the continent. As the British newspaper The Independent reported earlier this year, the Conservative technocrats currently steering or who have steered post-crash fiscal policy in Greece, Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, and now the UK, all hail from Goldman Sachs. In fact, the head of the European Central Bank itself, Mario Draghi, was the former managing director of Goldman Sachs International.

What’s happening goes back more than a decade

In 2001, Goldman Sachs secretly helped Greece hide billions of dollars through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps.

This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also created a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. But, always looking ahead, Goldman protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.

Goldman made similar deals here in the United States, masking the true value of investments, then selling those worthless investments to customers while placing bets that those same investments would eventually fail. The most notorious example was the “Timberwolf” deal, which brought down an Australian hedge fund, and which Goldman Sachs banksters emailed each other about, bragging, “Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.”

This sort of behavior by Goldman helped inflate, and then eventually pop, the housing bubble in the United States. The shockwave then ran across the Atlantic, hitting Europe and turning Goldman’s debt-masking deal with Greece years earlier sour, thus deepening the crisis.

All of these antics should have brought about the demise of Goldman as well, but with their alumni in key policy positions on both sides of the Atlantic, Goldman not only survived, it flourished.

 “The normal scenario usually involves helping a nation hide a problem and sell its debt until the problem blows up into a bubble that bursts in a spectacular way…Goldman Sachs then puts their ‘man’ into a position of power to direct the bailouts so that Goldman gets all its money back and more, while the nation's economy gets gutted.”

We no longer have an economy geared to benefit working people around the world; we have an economy that’s geared to exploit working people for Goldman Sachs' profits

And as we’ve seen over the last decade, Goldman Sachs knows exactly what to do. They’ve had the right plan set-up, and it's nothing short of a global coup d’etat.

As Rastani bluntly told the BBC, “This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out. The governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”