{"id":332129,"date":"2010-02-17T12:47:10","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T17:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/everyone-in-europe-has-been-cheating-on-each-other-2010-2"},"modified":"2010-02-17T12:47:10","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T17:47:10","slug":"everyone-in-europe-has-been-cheating-on-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/332129","title":{"rendered":"Everyone In Europe Has Been Cheating On Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the European Monetary Union was formed, the countries hoped to avoid a Greece situation by putting hard caps on public debt.<\/p>\n

Greece got around this by engaging in swaps with Goldman Sachs<\/a> that helped disguise its true debt levels.<\/p>\n

Earlier we noted how Italy<\/a> may have been obfuscating its debt as well.<\/p>\n

But the real story, it seems is that EVERYONE is doing this. The below document (via alea<\/a>) explains how France got busted for this as well back in 2007.<\/p>\n

And the lesson is that banks aren’t the only players that engage in regulatory arbitrage. Any institution — public, private, for-profit or otherwise — will seek to cut corners and come up with ways to disguise an aggressive or risky financial system.<\/p>\n

FR 2007.3 SNCF Debt Allocated to SAAD<\/a>
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