Tag Archives: Adults in the Room

In a recent article entitled “Varoufakis and the 2015 debt talks – behind closed doors”, published on the English language site of Kathimerini, Yannis Paleologos is putting forward an innovative new criticism of my 2015 negotiating stance regarding Greece’s public debt. His criticism’s first leg is standard troika-speak, insisting that by pressing for a deep re-structuring of Greece’s public debt I brought “the...

Today, on the anniversary of the stupendous NO with which 62% of Greek voters responded to a third predatory loan ultimatum from Greece’s ‘official’ lenders (the troika: IMF, ECB, EU), Greece’s oligarchic press – in cahoots with the troika itself – is hard at work in its attempt to demonise the people of Greece for having dared to say NO to yet another lost generation. The memory of our collective defiance still...

Reading Varoufakis: Frustrated Strategist of Greek Financial Deterrence (click here for the original site) by Adam Tooze  Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He is currently at work on a history of the global financial crisis 2008-2018, which will appear in time for the anniversary in September 2018. Adults in the...

This is a superbly written account of the struggle to alleviate the austerity imposed upon the Greek people by the eurozone. Greece, argues Varoufakis, has been put in a debtors’ prison and robbed of autonomy and dignity for the indefinite future. Critics would argue that he failed as finance minister in 2015 because he was insufficiently politic. More plausibly, he could never have succeeded, such were the...

It is no surprise that Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, turns up to our interview without a tie. The 56-year-old famously arrived at Downing Street in 2015 for a meeting with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with his shirt untucked. More surprising is that the left-wing economist, who led negotiations with creditors during the 2015 Greek government-debt crisis, is...

A former minister’s account of how Greece handled a financial meltdown is a tell-all political memoir like no other   G. Sampath Whether it is agricultural policies that hurt farmers’ interests or labour ‘reforms’ that erode workers’ rights, or welfare cuts that hurt the poor, it has been seen time and again in democracies around the world that all political parties, regardless of their electoral promises and...

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Russel-Brand-podcast-Under-the-Skin-June-2017.mp3

Dragged behind a chariot, watched by the crowd If you studied economics at Sydney University in the 1990s, you might have had the good fortune to be taught in first year by a charismatic young lecturer who earned the nickname of the Greek God. Yanis Varoufakis, who in his youth bore some resemblance to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, liked teaching first year because it gave him the opportunity to divest...

What happens when you take on the establishment? In this blistering, personal account, Yanis Varoufakis blows the lid on Europe’s hidden agenda and exposes what actually goes on in its corridors of power. ‘One of the greatest political memoirs of all time’ (Guardian) The Sunday Times Number 1 Bestseller Varoufakis sparked one of the most spectacular and controversial battles in recent political history when, as...

Yanis Varoufakis negotiated with the EU elite over the Greek bailout, witnessed firsthand the callous mathematics used to keep the union together. Today — after OXI, after Brexit, and after Trump — he and his comrades in DiEM25 are calling for a New Deal for Europe: a plan that can stabilize the European Union and return democracy to the people. He sat down with Doug Henwood on Behind the News to discuss this...