I haven’t written about the Greek situation since my ‘Greece is dead’ piece of a week ago today. This is because the Slog is meant to pinpoint and dismiss bollocks – and there are only so many times you can assert that the patient is terminal before it becomes tedious for all concerned. Sketches about parrots being deceased are funny: ‘this parrot it dying’, said forty times, wouldn’t have cut it. The situation there only becomes relevant now in the broader context of German bossiness. Yesterday, Greek PM Papandreou asked for an emergency IMF/EU session: it’s no longer about loans, he said: we can’t afford the repayments. See Slog piece ‘Moment of Truth’, also from a week ago.

“Greece is going to remain in recession for a number of years and that is going to make it very difficult for it to meet its deficit reduction plans,” said Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London. Actually, Jonathan has been saying this in private for weeks; but as already noted, Greece is dead. More pointedly, a senior German banking source told us yesterday that the ‘Mark hawks’ (as he calls them) in German banking are now very much in the ascendancy. As he was our key source for the original nby story at the start of 2009, we have to think the bloke probably knows what he’s talking about.

Frau Merkel will go with public opinion, and we don’t need any surveys to tell us what they’ll want. Equally important, however, is what this emerging German view will do for the Hedge Fund sector. They’ve played a role in the Greek demise without doubt – but the country was a basket case anyway….having been tempted to borrow much of its early loans from…..J P Morgan. Well well well. The question now is the extent to which the Hedgies will see this as Game On – and whether they already have Portugal and Spain in their sights. Slog sources are unanimous that they do.

What can governments and regulators do about this? The answer – and this too is now gradually emerging – is absolutely nothing, short of getting a SWAT team or the SAS involved. There are several reasons for this, and as always the trail leads back to Bourse madness.

Dark liquidity pools are places where financial whiz-kids aka crooks can quite deliberately obfuscate who’s buying, how, from whom – and crucially, when. The game is a bit like scamming the race track by predating your tickertape – except that this kind of sting usually got traced and blown away in the old days.

Today that’s impossible, because high-velocity trading software adds speed to the darkness. Imagine trying to see a black bullet in the pitch dark of rural night, and you’re about there.

As soon as anyone says ‘regulation’ to bankers, the international smear-machine gets going. Images of command economy, lazy bureaucrats and Russian queues are summoned up. But it’s time ordinary citizens wised up about this bollocks – and it is 100% triple-filtered bollocks. If people obey the law and leave the playing field level after they’ve finished returfing it, regulation can be feather-light. If however folks behave like greedy parasites (and on the whole, that’s what financiers do) then long prison sentences will be required. The financial services sector needs to be told – right now – “when it comes to regulation, it’s your call”.

I hope to return to this theme in the coming weeks.