One of Goldman Sachs' senior bankers claimed yesterday that the transparency standards surrounding controversial currency swaps the bank structured for the Greek government in 2001 “could have and should have been higher”.
Goldman is under fire from European regulators and politicians for helping Greece to conceal the true extent of its national debt through a series of complex financial transactions just after it was admitted to Europe's monetary union.
Gerald Corrigan, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who joined Goldman in 1994, yesterday told a UK parliamentary committee that, “with the benefit of hindsight”, the regulatory standards governing those deals should have been higher.