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Steve Keen – My review on Yanis Varoufakis’ “Adults in the Room”

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Steve keen on Twitter Yanis has just penned a superb review of reviews of Adults in the Room, and it's prompted me to make my review (which I only published on Amazon) more widely known. Here it is below, and here's the link to the review on Amazon. Buy Yanis's book. It's the only way you'll understand what's about to unfold in Italy  A cracking tale of the first act in the destruction of Europe by Europe's unelected elite  First an admission: Yanis and I have been friends since we met in 1991, when I was doing my PhD at the University of New South Wales and he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. This hasn't influence my review however: if I hadn't enjoyed the book, I would simply not have written one. Having read it, I am confident that it will go down as one of the

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Steve keen on Twitter

Yanis has just penned a superb review of reviews of Adults in the Room, and it's prompted me to make my review (which I only published on Amazon) more widely known. Here it is below, and here's the link to the review on Amazon.
Buy Yanis's book. It's the only way you'll understand what's about to unfold in Italy

 A cracking tale of the first act in the destruction of Europe by Europe's unelected elite 

First an admission: Yanis and I have been friends since we met in 1991, when I was doing my PhD at the University of New South Wales and he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. This hasn't influence my review however: if I hadn't enjoyed the book, I would simply not have written one.
Having read it, I am confident that it will go down as one of the great political biographies of the 21st century. It is a work that people will turn to when they try to understand what on earth happened during our time: a riveting, compelling history of a critical act in the self-inflicted decay of European civilisation.
Most political biographies are an attempt to rescue a reputation that deserved to be sullied. This one confronts the many barbs that were thrown Yanis's way, but he doesn't refrain from throwing some barbs at himself either when, on reflection, he wished he had taken a different course. That takes a courage and an honesty that I came to expect from knowing Yanis, and he did not disappoint.
As the tragedy of Syriza unfolded in 2015, I had wished that Yanis would deploy the one Big Stick he had: the threat to default from Greece's unpayable loans from the IMF. On its own this was not significant, but as he explains in the book, it would in turn have triggered a cascade of defaults that would have undone Mario Dragi's program of Quantitative Easing.
He did, once, have his finger on that trigger, and decided not to pull it--to wait and leave the act to Tsipras. Looking back in this book, he now wishes he had done so. If he had, he could have forced the Troika to work with Greece on a sensible program, rather than watch them impose one which will lead to Greece becoming Europe's Somalia.
I like to think that I would have pulled that trigger. But I wasn't there in the hot seat: Yanis was, and he tells the tale impeccably well. This is a cracking yarn as well as a priceless political history, with major actors--Dragi, Tsipras, Merkel and above all Schauble--exposed by their own words.
They will not like to have their words and deeds documented this well, which is all the more reason you should read it. 

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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