The Myth Of the Rational Market
Martin Wolf about The End Game
Finanskrisen -
The Great Recession
Varoufakis
Varoufakis: A balanced capitalist economy requires a magic number, in the form of the prevailing real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate.
How do free marketeers convince themselves that there exists a single real interest rate (say, 2%)
that would inspire investors to funnel all existing savings into productive investments
and spur employers to hire everyone who wishes to work at the prevailing wage?
Yanis Varoufakis Project Syndicate 19 March 2019
The Italian crisis was the Left’s final warning
The 2008 financial crisis was our generation’s 1929
It’s time to explain how the bloc, and the euro, could be run differently, democratically and sustainably
Yanis Varoufakis New Statesman op-ed, 6 June 2018
I wanted to keep Greece in the eurozone sustainably and was clashing with Germany’s leaders in favor of the debt restructuring that would make this possible.
By crushing our Europeanist government in the summer of 2015, Germany sowed the seeds of today’s bitter harvest:
a majority in Italy’s parliament that dreams of exiting the euro.
Yanis Varoufakis Project Syndicate 29 May 2018
I warned my interlocutors at a Eurogroup meeting of eurozone finance ministers:
“If you insist on policies that condemn whole populations to a combination of permanent stagnation and humiliation, you will soon have to deal not with Europeanist leftists like us but, instead, with anti-Europeanist xenophobes who see it as their vocation to disintegrate the European Union.”
IMF calls for an agreement on Greece’s debt by next week
CNBC 15 May 2018
Varoufakis
Does Europe Really Need Fiscal and Political Union?
Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate 11 December 2017
Rolf Gustavsson om "den informella maktstruktur som man skulle kunna kalla ”det djupa EU”
SvD 10 februari 2018
För att få en skymt av inblick i "det djupa EU" rekommenderar jag en krävande bok: "Adults in the Room" av Yanis Varoufakis, som under en kort tid var Greklands finansminister.
Dess knappt 500 sidor borde vara obligatorisk läsning, icke minst för alla oss som gillar EU-tanken.
Den allra viktigaste lärdomen är att EU:s helt avgörande maktcentrum ligger i Berlin.
Varoufakis redogör för sina samtal och förhandlingar med Schäuble. De båda var överens på en bestämd punkt; att Grekland var statsfinansiellt bankrutt.
Varoufakis sökte förgäves räddningen i en skuldavskrivning. Schäuble ville rädda tyska och franska banker undan kreditförluster och undvika spridningseffekter till andra länder.
Av konfrontationen framgår att den tyske finansministern öppet föraktade EU:s institutioner, icke minst EU-kommissionen och Jean-Claude Juncker
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- Den stora risken var att Grekland skulle utlösa en kris i italienska, franska och tyska banker.
Nu finns i praktiken en EU-garanti för de utestående grekiska statsobligationerna.
Anders Borg, TT, SvD papper 22 februari 2012
Adults in the Room
Yanis Varoufakis, the colourful former Greek finance minister,
who bears the scars of his country’s bruising scrap with the EU over its debt crisis.
Telegraph, 3 October 2017
David Davis is currently reading his account of those talks, Adults in the Room, a searing indictment of the anti-democratic, underhand and downright mendacious tactics used by what Varoufakis calls the EU’s “deep establishment” to make the Greeks grovel.
“Brussels is a democracy-free zone,” he wrote. “It is the nature of the beast to treat the will of electorates as a nuisance that must be, somehow, negated.”
Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment
Western capitalism has few sacred cows left.
It is time to question one of them: the independence of central banks from elected governments.
Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate 29 August 2017
With the rise of financialization, commercial banks have become increasingly reliant on one another for short-term loans, mostly backed by government bonds, to finance their daily operations.
With the rise of inter-bank money, backed mostly by government debt, fiscal policy has become an essential factor in determining the quantity of actual money lubricating modern capitalism.
The Great Crash (2007/8) ten years on – talking on BBC Radio 4’s World At One special program
11 August 2017
From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in
an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium.
It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China,
providing the world’s most efficient factories with the requisite demand.
How was this growing trade deficit paid for?
Yanis Varoufakis 11 November 2016
By the return of around 70% of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America’s financial markets.
To keep this recycling mechanism going, Wall Street had to be unshackled from all constraints; leftovers from President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods agreement which sought to regulate financial markets. This is why Washington officials were so keen to deregulate finance: Wall Street provided the conduit through which increasing capital inflows from the rest of the world equilibrated the US deficits which were, in turn, providing the rest of the world with the aggregate demand stabilising the globalisation process. And so on.
Why I am reading Stockman and Varoufakis
The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Om jag hittar det igen i min dator eller via Google återkommer jag med hans berättelse om hur han förklarade saker för sina finansministerkollegor inom Eurozonen
medan de stirrade med tomma ögon framför sig och sedan körde över honom och Grekland i ännu en extend-and-pretend-lösning.
En kaxig narcissist som förre finansministern Yanis Varoufakis har tvingats lämna scenen.
Ingen saknar honom.
Richard Swartz, kolumn DN 22 oktober 2016
Yanis Varoufakis talks again, insults everybody
The ex-Greek finance minister closes out a difficult year by torching his former Eurogroup colleagues.
www.politico.eu/LAURENS CERULUS 12/24/15
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/the-global-minotaur/
Before 1971, US global hegemony was predicated upon America’s current-account surplus with the rest of the capitalist world,
which the US helped to stabilize by recycling part of its surplus to Europe and Japan.
This underpinned economic stability and sharply declining inequality everywhere.
But, as America slipped into a deficit position, that global system could no longer function,
giving rise to what I have called the Global Minotaur phase.
Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate 28 November 2016