The New York Times’ Floyd Norris is still having a hard time giving up the tired and largely debunked Enron narrative.

This time, Norris applies the Enron narrative to Greece, which supposedly hid its true financial condition from honest investors through engaging in complex derivative transactions with the ever-present and greedy investment bankers.

There is one big problem with Norris’ morality tale.

It’s not true.

As University of Houston finance professor Craig Pirrong points out in this blog post that runs rings around Norris and the Times’ dubious analysis, what Greece was doing in using swaps engineered by the investment banks to finance its way into the European Monetary Union has been well known since the early part of this decade.

Thus, as Professor Pirrong points out, “nobody  .   .   . has any more reason to be shocked about these transactions than Captain Reynaud had to be shocked about gambling going on at Rick’s.”

That includes Floyd Norris and the New York Times.