My bathroom scales disclosed recently that I have added a few unwelcome kilos. I can't prove anything yet, but I am pretty sure that Goldman Sachs is behind it. 

            I've uncovered some pretty compelling evidence, all backed up by some very big numbers to reduce its implausibility. Consider: Last August, Goldman decided to help Dole Foods sell $446 million in stock so that Dole could cut down its $1.9 billion in debt. Goldman and the three other banks that underwrote the deal pulled in a reported $81 million in fees, part of which undoubtedly went to pay Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's $9 million deferred stock bonus. One of Dole's biggest products is - that's right - bananas, rising sales of which in booming Asia contributed to $3.7 billion in fresh fruit sales at Dole in the first 9 months of 2009. Now everyone knows that the best way to serve bananas is buried in ice cream and topped off with 500 calories worth of chocolate syrup, whipped cream, walnuts and a maraschino cherry.

            Delicious and diabolical. But wait, there's more. Following that seeming piece de resistance, what does Goldman do? Last month, it signed up to help a company called Express sell $200 million in stocks, again to pay down debts. And what does Express sell? Clothes. Coincidence? I don't think so.

            This is just one example of how bankers, motivated by pure unbridled greed, are pursuing profits at the expense of the public interest. You should hear what Goldman has been up to in Greece . Apparently bankers from Goldman spent years finding ways to sell products to Greece that would enable its government to keep borrowing even after exceeding the limits it agreed to when it joined the European Union. Goldman would, for example, structure a deal in which investors would give Greece cash in return for a promise that it would pay them later with revenues from some lucrative business, like the airports or the national lottery. And because this was packaged as the sale of future income, it wasn't technically a loan and so Greece didn't have to list it among its debts.

            Then, a little company that Goldman and other banks control last year conveniently established a set of bathroom scales for Greek debt called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index. This index tracks the price of several European government credit default swaps, which are insurance policies against debt default. You buy a credit default swap, or CDS, on a borrower and if he defaults, you still get paid. People trade these CDSs, and the price rises or falls depending on how likely investors think the borrow is to pay up.

            Sneaky bankers! Imagine lending money to some schmuck you know is already overly indebted and trying to profit from it. That's like offering Krispy Kreme credit cards with loyalty points to the morbidly obese. Or giving a second mortgage to some American with no credit rating and no education. Or buying bonds from Dubai even after it tells you its debts are larger than its entire economy. That doesn't happen, does it?

            Why yes, it does, except perhaps for the Krispy Kreme part. There are people out there who gladly profit from our lack of self control. I was at Lulu last week and there were absolutely no warning labels on the baklava. Does Lulu have no shame? And unless you're in a Toyota, there is virtually no way to hold a car company responsible for building SUVs that can roar down the highway at 200kph and wrap themselves around lampposts.

            As a result, there's a rearguard action by columnists, pundits and other so-called experts to assign responsibility for Greece 's debt problems on, of all people, Greece .

            Haven't the Greeks been through enough already? First there was that trollope Helen of Troy, who launched a thousand ships on fraternity row. Now we're awash in bad Greek clichés, being told to beware of Greeks bearing Trojan horses, singing siren songs or Spartan ditties.

            And now the Europeans are after the credit-default swaps, in particular naked trading of CDS. Don't get excited. This is not derivatives trading on a nude beach. Naked trading is when the holder of the CDS doesn't own the bond the CDS is supposed to insure. In what is now a rather tired comparison, naked CDS trading has been likened to allowing your neighbor to buy fire insurance on your house. You shouldn't be surprised if next time you see him he's fertilizing your lawn with napalm.

            Regulators want to know just who among the hedge funds has been betting against the Euro and if they're the same people who stand to be paid off if the Greeks default. Somehow I see this all coming back to Goldman.

            The Germans, meanwhile, are upset about having to bail out the profligate Greeks, with some German politicians suggesting that Greece should sell of a few islands to balance the books. They already have, judging from the number of German retirees that appear to have occupied much of coastal Greece .

            Forgotten, somehow, in all of this is the fact that when it comes to cheating on their fiscal diets, the Europeans look worse than the US government.

            The Greeks fudged their accounts when they joined the EU and kept cooking the books thereafter, low-balling their annual deficits and then revising them upwards later, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. But it was an open secret, it seems, in the European Union. Belgium , France , Portugal and Spain -- none had apparently reached the targets needed to enter the currency union when they did so back in 1999.

            I can't decide who I should blame. Can I get another tray of baklava over here?