With the same sense of destructive impunity shown against AIG the height of the US crisis, financial services firm may now be profiteering from the Greek debt turmoil that currently has the eurozone in a bind. Andrew Cockburn takes a look at how some of the usual suspects may be encircling the easiest prey around, a limping Greece:

“…Wall Street gamblers – banks, hedge funds and other players. Scenting blood in the water, they have been busily placing enormous bets on whether the Greeks would go belly up or be helped out by the Germans. They do this through the medium of ‘credit default swaps’, a form of insurance against default by Greek or any other bonds. Typically, this kind of so-called insurance protection will be offered by a pension fund or some similar institution looking to earn a nice income from premium payments.

“The buy[er]s of the

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Mathew Goldstein of Reuters broke a major story on Sunday implying just that. While most in the US were celebrating the 4th of July, a Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was being held on federal charges of stealing top-secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution—that sources say is none other than Goldman Sachs.

This news is huge.  Why?  Because Goldman consistently ranks number one in the NYSE’s program trading report.  And this highly profitable desk is now in jeopardy.

The secret codes the accused man, Sergey Aleynikov, allegedly stole affect a section of the trading group that deals with low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submissions. Also known as one of Goldman’s biggest profit centers.

Federal authorities say the platform quickly processes rapid developments in the markets and uses top secret mathematical formulas to allow the firm to make highly-profitable automated trades.

The case began unfolding on

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Stock markets came under pressure over the past few days as skepticism crept in that economic green shoots could be withering. On top of that, fears that the the US could be facing a credit rating downgrade (are the rating agencies now relevant again?) also caused losses for the US dollar and bonds.

These issues, together with another dose of discussion about the repayment of TARP funds, featured prominently in this week’s video clips. Commentators included in the selection below include James Galbraith, Jim Bianco, Robert Shiller, Sam Stovall, Bill Gross, David Rosenberg, Jim Rogers and Steve Leuthold.

The compilation kicks off with a top-quality interview with James Galbraith, saying that the banks can hardly lose but the rest of us aren’t so lucky, and concludes with the “American Casino” movie trailer.

Yahoo Finance, Tech Ticker: Galbraith - banks can hardly lose “Big banks have raised billions since the stress tests and policymakers

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