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Some heavyweight hedge funds have launched large bearish bets against the Euro in moves that are reminiscent of the trading action at the height of the U.S. financial crisis.

The big bets are emerging amid gatherings such as an exclusive "idea dinner" earlier this month that included hedge-fund titans SAC Capital Advisors LP and Soros Fund Management LLC. During the dinner, hosted by a boutique investment bank at a private townhouse in Manhattan, a small group of all-star hedge-fund managers argued that the Euro is likely to fall to "parity"—or equal on an exchange basis—with the dollar, people close to the situation say.

Apparently the big point that I was trying to make got lost in the translation. And so I want to make that point again. That what these guys were doing is they weren't just betting against Greece. It wasn't that. It's that they have the ability, in fact, let's back up a little bit.

Between 1936 and 1982, certain kinds of derivatives, particularly certain types of options, where you weren't a party to the sale, were illegal. In other words, you could, an oil company and an airline could buy derivatives from each other, they could buy futures, and they could even buy insurance on those future bets, but that was it, because they were actual counterparties who were going to sell or take possession of the product.

In '82 the Futures Trading Act of 1982 legalized the modern options. But they still weren't much used because nobody really understood them and son in January of '93, Wendy Gramm of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, promised to provide a safe haven for these futures. And in '87 a guy by the name of Michael Milken invented something called the Collateralized Debt Obligation, CDO. In 2000 because of Wendy Gramm again, with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and her husband Phil, complete deregulation happened.

So what we have now is that a bank can bet on something happening without having any skin in the game. These are called naked derivatives, naked swaps, naked options. And well here, Joel Skousen wrote a great piece for this for World Affairs Brief called "Rigging the markets - how they do it". And he says Goldman can create ten trillion dollars, ten trillion Eros in short positions. They can create it out of thin air. They don't have to own any Euros. They don't have to own any Greek bonds. They can simply bet against it. And not just to the tune of a few billion. To the tune of a few trillion. How do they get ten trillion dollars? How can they make a ten trillion dollar bet? They can borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed, because they've redefined themselves as a bank, at no interest.

So they borrow this money for no interest, they use that money to create these naked bets that are in the trillions. Now, keep in mind the GDP of the entire planet is 66 trillion dollars. There's not ten trillion Euros in circulation. But Goldman can create a ten trillion dollar bet against the Euro. They can create shorts, short positions, faster than any country can create money. And that's my concern. That's my concern, and just to pass it back to you Cenk, this is a big deal. And the practice of naked shorts, nit just naked shorts, of the whole CDO thing that Michael Milken started, should be banned. It needs to be outlawed.

And the French and the Germans right now are talking about banning it in Europe because they don't want to see their country be the next victim of these banksters. This is a rigged game. There's a reason why the five largest banks in the United States in the last 3 months haven't had, by and large haven't had a single day when they didn't make money. Because they always win their bets because they've rigged the game. And because they can borrow a virtually infinite amount of money, well, a large amount of money from our Fed at no interest rate.

These banksters, first they're going after Greece. What's the low hanging fruit? How do we try it out? That's a trial run. That's just a trial run. They're, Greece has whatever their debt is. Let's say they've got a trillion dollars in debt, or a trillion Euros in debt. So the banksters come up with two trillion dollars in shorts against it. There's no way that Greece can stand up to that. I mean, they just wipe it out. And what happens is, of course, all the debt holders freak out, nobody wants to buy their debt any more, it's under attack, you know, using these what Warren Buffet referred to as financial weapons of mass destruction, which they are, and so the banksters go after Greece.

It drives up the interest rates because Greece has to pay more to get people to buy their bonds, to buy their debt. Once the interest rate goes up that means the cost to Greece over the long term of paying off their debt, which includes the cost of the interest rate, goes up, even though Greece hasn;t borrowed an extra penny. All of a sudden their national debt goes up millions, hundreds of millions, tens of, you know, billions of dollars or Euros. Because the interest rate has gone up. And as the interest rate goes up, then Moody's looks at it, you know, Standard and Poor, whatever, the ratings agencies, they look at it and go, 'you know, this doesn't look so safe, it's coming under attack from the banksters. We're going to downgrade them from triple B down to double B'. Which means, that's the threshold between commercial grade paper and junk paper.

All of a sudden Greece's bonds are junk bonds, then you've got a bunch, you know, the state of California, some unions, some nations, they have laws on the books, or policies, that say, 'we don't buy junk bonds, you;ve got to be at least triple B, you've got to be commercial grade in order for us', so they start dumping the bonds, which increases the rate at which the value of these debt instruments that Greece is issuing falls, which further increases the interest rate they have to pay, which further increases the payoff to the banksters on the bet that they placed in the first place that they could bring it down. Because the reason that they're bringing it down is because they placed bets that will pay them profits based on it crashing.

I mean, I realize it sounds insane, but that's the system works, That's how rigged it is and it's just so wrong.