(Repost from Feb. 25:) Goldman Sachs and Greece

Dear blog readers:  This is a restored version of one of the posts, from Feb. 25, that we lost when our blog got !@#$%&ed up in the past couple of days.  I have figured out how to fix the half-dozen posts that were broken, and how to post new ones, but it involves a laborious fix (posting; going onto our server; downloading the resulting html file; deleting a string of javascript code that is somehow being generated now but wasn't a week ago; re-uploading the html file).  If anyone's an expert on blogger or wants to help us (pro bono?) migrate our blog to some better blogging software (e.g. WordPress would be my preference), give us a shout.

Today's

has two stories about Greece: one on the front page about how banks, including some that helped the Greek government hide its bad debt, are now using credit default swaps to bet that Greece will default on its debt (thereby making this more likely to happen); and another, on p. A13, about the massive protests against budget cuts in Greece, including the country's second 24-hour general strike in two weeks. (In the second article, an accompanying photo appears to show tens or hundreds of thousands of protesters, but is accompanied by a caption mentioning "thousands" of protesters.)

We have been meaning to do a post about an interesting item posted to Naked Capitalism earlier this week, by fund manager Marshall Auerback and L. Randall Wray, from the UMKC economics department (one of the main heterodox departments in the United States):

Memo to Greece: Make War, Not Love, With Goldman Sachs

By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City | February 22, 2010

Read the original post.