Now that is a long title, but it tries to link what is happening in Greece to the servers in Manhattan and why the Dow could drop nearly 1,000 points to bounce back within 30 minutes on Thursday this week.

The EU has agreed a EUR 110 bn rescue package for Greece and EU leaders are meeting this weekend to calm the markets. In the US media there is a lot of scare and panic about who is next: Spain and Portugal. While among socialist governments such as Portugal, but echoed by France, they are blaming the current bond yield increases on speculations and that the rating agencies should be examined, and why not setting up some European rating agencies that would be less evil to the PIIGS. Is that all gibberish?

A Luxembourgish think-tank voxeu.org today tried to explain the difference between Greece and the other PIGS to internal or external debt and tried to outline some solutions to restructure this debt. This analysis did not put much attention to why external debt increased so much in these countries for such a long time. After joining the Eurozone, the PIIGS got easy access to cheap money. Companies like Goldman Sachs were more than willing to take advantage of that situation.

Warren Buffet already in 2003 warned about the “weapons of mass financial destruction”. The derivatives market exploded, with investment banks selling billions of dollars worth of these investments to clients as a way to off-load or manage market risk. But Mr Buffett argued that such highly complex financial instruments are time bombs and "financial weapons of mass destruction" that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system.

It is no secret that the Greek government was working with Goldman Sachs for years to “sort out” the numbers for the Greek debt. SEC was accusing Goldman Sachs of fraud in their practice of failing to tell investors the securities underlying a so-called synthetic collateralized debt obligation were chosen by a short-seller, John Paulson, whose fund was betting the CDO would lose value. Whatever bad is exposed about Blankfein and co the strategy is to settle, so that they can carry on as usual.

Ellen Brown at huffingtonpost.com writes: Last week, Goldman Sachs was on the congressional hot seat, grilled for fraud in its sale of complicated financial products called "synthetic CDOs." This week the heat was off, as all eyes turned to the attack of the shorts on Greek sovereign debt and the dire threat of a sovereign Greek default. By Thursday, Goldman's fraud had slipped from the headlines and Congress had been cowed into throwing in the towel on its campaign to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. On Friday, Goldman was in settlement talks with the SEC.  Goldman and Wall Street reign. Congress appears helpless to discipline the big banks, just as the European Central Bank appears helpless to prevent the collapse of the European Union. . . . Or are they?

The shorts circled like sharks in the Greek bond market, following a highly suspicious downgrade of Greek debt by Moody's on Monday. Ratings by private ratings agencies, long suspected of being in the pocket of Wall Street, often seem to be timed to cause stocks or bonds to jump or tumble, causing extreme reactions in the market. The Greek downgrade was suspicious and unexpected because the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund had just pledged 110 billion Euros to avoid a debt default in Greece.

Markets were roiled further on Thursday, when the U.S. stock market suddenly lost nearly 1,000 points, and just as suddenly recovered two-thirds of that loss. The leading theory seems to be that New York Stock Exchange specialists fighting an imbalance in buy and sell orders slowed trading and that computerized stock platforms off the exchange drove prices down. The specialists needed the momentary delay to bring buyers and sellers together and get prices in line.

It appeared to be such a clear case of tampering that Maria Bartiromo blurted out on CNBC, "That is ridiculous. This really sounds like market manipulation to me."  Just look at this video with Jim Cramer when it all happened!

Manipulation by whom? Markets can be rigged with computers using high-frequency trading programs (HFT), which now compose 70% of market trading; and Goldman Sachs is the undisputed leader in this new gaming technique.

Matt Taibbi maintains that Goldman Sachs has been "engineering every market manipulation since the Great Depression." When Goldman does not get its way, it is in a position to throw a tantrum and crash the market. It can do this with automated market making technologies like the one invented by Max Keiser, which he claims is now being used to turbocharge market manipulation. Goldman was an investment firm until September 2008, when it became a "bank holding company" overnight in order to capitalize on the bank bailout, including borrowing virtually interest-free from the Federal Reserve and other banks. In January, when President Obama backed Paul Volcker in his plan to reinstate a form of the Glass-Steagall Act that would separate investment banking from commercial banking, the market collapsed on cue, and the Volcker Rule faded from the headlines.

When Goldman got dragged before Congress and the SEC in April, the Greek crisis arose as a "counterpoint," diverting attention to that growing conflagration. Greece appears to be the sacrificial play in the EU just as Lehman Brothers was in the U.S., "the hostage the kidnappers shoot to prove they mean business."

It is still possible, however, for the European Central Bank to snatch Greece from the fire and rout the shorts. It can do this with what has been called the nuclear option -- "monetizing" the debt of Greece and other debt-laden EU countries by effectively "printing money" (quantitative easing) and buying the debt itself at very low interest rates. This is called the "nuclear option" because it would blow up the hedge funds and electronic sharks operated by Goldman and other Wall Street heavies, which specialize in bringing down corporations and whole countries for strategic and exploitative ends.

Will the ECB proceed with this plan? Perhaps, say some experts. It could just be waiting for the German regional election on Sunday, which the ECB does not want to appear to be influencing.