Speculators lose a fortune betting on Greek matters

Got to love domainers and their opinionated one liners: Greece is finished! It’s Greece’s fault! Greece out!

As a Greek transplant in the US with family in Greece, I have the advantage of being more objective than those that rely on spectacular media photos and television mumbo-jumbo in order to form an opinion. Like a modern life Colossus of Rhodes, I actually have one foot planted in Greece and another in the US. I don’t rely on canned journalism to understand what is going on with Greece.

Allow me to elaborate.

A fine example of what happened with the so-called ‘Greek debt’ is this: someone registered the domain name GreekReferendum.com a couple of days ago. They did so based on the speculation that Greece would hold a public referendum of major importance.

Unfortunately, the same person – the Greek prime minister George Papandreou – who came up with this ‘brilliant’ idea, decided to retract it, citing reasons of national interest when in fact he succumbed to public outrage from Greeks and Europeans alike.

So our ‘investor’ who registered GreekReferendum.com just lost $10 or so, as the domain is with GoDaddy.

While this amount is miniscule, it represents the same notion that was followed by US banks such as Chase Manhattan and Golden Sachs with regards to Greece: by investing in national bonds of debt, they then turned around and lowered the credibility of Greece, creating the global financial chaos and social misery that Greece is now blamed for.

Investing $10 in a domain name that is based on sensationalist news is an example of bad investment.

On a larger scale, banks and institutions need to stop playing these speculation games on the backs of nations. As the Occupy Wall Street movement increases in momentum, it’s clear that the “suits” that attempt to unbalance the world from behind the Manhattan offices will soon face their own music.

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