1. Did Goldman Sachs do anything wrong legally or ethically? Explain your answer.
2. Would it make a difference if other investment bankers were also providing such services?
3. What subsequent impacts could the transactions described above have on Goldman Sachs?

On February 11, 2010, the leaders of the European Union (EU) agreed on a plan to bail out Greece, a country that had joined the EU in 1981 and was admitted to the European Monetary Union (EMU) allowing Greece to adopt the Euro as its currency in 2001. Greece had been unable to pay its bills, or to borrow more money to do so because it had overspent its income on its social programs and other projects. In the aftermath of providing Greece with bailout credit ultimately totaling €100 billion ($147 billion), 1 questions were asked about how this could have happened. A spotlight was brought to bear on how Goldman Sachs (GS) had enabled Greece to qualify for adopting the Euro in the first place, 2 and for providing the means to hide some transactions in which Greece pledged its future revenues in return for instant cash to spend. In a sense, GS helped Greece draw a veil over its finances with arrangements that were not transparent.