As the euro crisis rumbles on, so do the complaints of various governments against financial players who have had the effrontery to speculate against this rotten, ill-conceived and questionably maintained currency.

The Financial Times ran details over the weekend of the latest efforts to punish people for trying to profit from the fact that the emperor had no clothes:

Greece ordered its bankers to exclude hedge funds from a bond offering this week in an effort to punish the speculators it blames for destabilising its debt markets. The decision came amid growing anger among European leaders over what they see as the role speculators played in undermining the Greek debt market and driving the country towards a possible default. During a meeting in Berlin yesterday Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, promised a joint push both in the European Union and the Group of 20 leading economies to clamp down on speculators who seek to exploit uncertainty over sovereign debt. According to people familiar with this week’s €5bn (£4.5bn) Greek bond issue authorities in Athens told banks handling the sale to make sure they did not allocate any bonds to hedge funds or any bodies that might be a proxy, or front, for them. Government bond managers typically prefer to sell their bonds to traditional “buy-and-hold” investors such as asset managers, pension funds and life assurance companies rather than hedge funds. This is because hedge funds can cause sharp swings in bond prices as they buy and sell quickly in an effort to make fast profits. But this week’s instruction from Athens went further than usual, according to people familiar with the deal. Petros Christodoulou, head of Greece’s debt management agency, said: “The vast majority of the issue went to real money investors.” One hedge fund manager said: “This seems counterproductive to me. Here is a country that is struggling to sell its bonds. Surely it should not be turning away buyers.” He also said hedge funds provided liquidity to markets enabling traditional funds to buy and sell their bonds more easily.

Moves such as these are in essence a theatrical performance designed (1) to bolster longer term efforts on the part of France and Germany to hobble Wall Street and the City of London; and (2) to distract attention from the failure of eurozone governments to ensure that the zone’s members all made an honest attempt to comply with the euro’s rulebook.

Put a slightly different way, it seems clear that there were problems with the data that Greece (and perhaps others) were submitting to those responsible for managing the euro. The questions for Merkel are (1) when did she know this; and (2) what did she do about it. Germany’s taxpayers will be curious to know the answer.