Tag Archives: European Crisis

[Originally published here] The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time...

Donald Trump’s victory marks the end of an era when a self-confident Establishment preached the end of history, the end of passion and the supremacy of a technocracy working on behalf of the 1%. But the era it ushers in is not new. It is a new variant of the 1930s, featuring deflationary economics, xenophobia and divide-and-rule politics. Passion has returned to politics but not in a way that will help the 80% left behind since the 1970s. Passion is now fuelling misanthropy. Passion is...

[Originally published in Zocalo] British citizens took to the polls to cast their “Leave” ballots—and their grievances—in the now-infamous Brexit vote last June, seeking to escape the overarching power of the European Union. Their triumph stunned British and global elites, but shouldn’t have; the odds were stacked in the Leave camp’s favor. The groundwork for the Brexit debacle was laid the previous summer when Europe crushed the progressive pro-European SYRIZA government elected in...

[embedded content] On the panel are Conservative former chancellor Ken Clarke MP, Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner MP, runner up in the UKIP leadership election Lisa Duffy, DiEM25 initiator and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the previous owner of the Daily Telegraph Conrad Black.

In This Review And the Weak Suffer What They Must? – Yanis Varoufakis Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and Europe – James K. Galbraith The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe – Joseph Stiglitz Some foreign policy decisions hang like albatrosses around the necks of the states that made them. For the United States, the war in Iraq offers the prime example of a costly and seemingly irreversible blunder. For...

Friday 23/9/2016 (click here for the Eurofinance site & here for a related Keynote speech) How long can Europe go on like this? In mid-July Germany sold €4.038bn of 10-year zero-coupon bonds with a yield of minus 0.05 per cent. This added a few more billions to the more than €4.25 trillion euros-worth of euro-zone government bonds that now carry a negative yield. These yields and the ECB’s €80-billion a month quantitative easing policy have now infected non-government markets....

https://varoufakis.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/eurofinanceoct2016.m4a

Yanis Varoufakis responds to Alexis Cukier and Patrick Surain, who challenged him on his time as Greek finance minister, the feasibility of reforming existing EU structures, and a left-wing exit from the EU. Read ‘the challenge’ here. Friends, Thank you for your article in reply to my op-ed ‘The Left After Brexit’. Here is my response to your important questions and retorts, which I take the liberty to summarise in the following headings: 1. Why did I sign the 20 February 2015 agreement...

Yanis Varoufakis: The left never recovered from the fall of the Soviet Union — yet there is hope The left has been in disarray since 1991 – it never fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite widespread opposition to Stalinism and ­authoritarianism. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a major spasm of global capitalism that has triggered a long deflationary period across the United States and Europe. Just as the Great Depression did in the 1930s, this has...

Yanis Varoufakis has told the UK government to get a move on with triggering Article 50 to begin a “robust debate” on what a post-Brexit Britain could look like. In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, the former Greek finance minister, said the discussion prior to the referendum was of “very low quality”, adding that once article 50 is invoked Britain should use the negotiating period to prepare itself as nation. On what strategy the UK should adopt Varoufakis said: “My advice is...