Op-ed
DiEM25’s radical Europeanist political agenda – Interviewed by Jacobin’s David Broder
, 03/11/2018
Last Friday, Yanis Varoufakis was in Italy to promote European Spring, a list of candidates standing across the continent in next May’s European election. The former Greek finance minister visited Rome just days after the European Commission had struck down the Italian government’s budget, sparking further rows over Brussels’ authority to curb member states’ spending. […]
, 01/10/2018
ATHENS – As deadlines approach and red lines are redrawn in the United Kingdom’s impending withdrawal from the European Union, it is imperative for the people of Britain to regain democratic control over a process that is opaque and ludicrously irrational. The question is: How? Democracy can never aspire to being more than a work […]
Is the world safer than it was in 2008? Ten Guardian writers think not
, 17/09/2018
Yanis Varoufakis: Risk has not been diminished, just taken out of sight Ten years after its near-death experience, capitalism is back to its old ways. Bailouts for the few and austerity for the many have caused global debt to rise 40% since 2007. Yes, British and European banks have contracted (as US authorities required Barclays, Deutsche […]
Our Progressive International movement will fight, at once, two authoritarianisms: The National International and the Financialised Globalists who paved the ground for them – Yanis Varoufakis & Bernie Sanders in THE GUARDIAN (13th September 2018)
, 14/09/2018
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Our new international movement will fight rising nationalism, its underlying fascist moment, and the pseudo-liberal establishment whose policies gave rise to it (Click here for The Guardian) Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of a globally unifying rightwing – a Nationalist International – that sprang out of the cesspool of financialised capitalism. […]
Ten Years After Lehman’s Collapse: What caused the Crash of 2008 is now shaping our post-modern 1930s – der Freitag
, 10/09/2018
In the autumn of 2008 events unfolded in Wall Street that the crushing majority of people around the world had been led to believe could never occur. It was the financial equivalent of watching the sun spinning out of control soon after it rose above the horizon. Humanity watched on in collective disbelief. The […]
Im Reich der Gier – der Freitag
, 10/09/2018
Mythos Der Kapitalismus ist entzaubert und bringt uns das größte Faschismusproblem seit den Dreißigern Was im Herbst 2008 an der Wall Street geschah, hatten die allermeisten Menschen bis dahin für unmöglich gehalten, schließlich hatte man ihnen jahrelang weisgemacht, dass etwas Derartiges schlichtweg nicht passieren könnte. Es war, als ob man dabei zuguckt, wie die Sonne, kurz […]
The three tribes of austerity: enemies of big government, Germany’s social democrats, and tax-cutting Republicans – op-ed in Project Syndicate
, 31/08/2018
No policy is as self-defeating during recessionary times as the pursuit of a budget surplus for the purpose of containing public debt – austerity, for short. So, as the world approaches the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is appropriate to ask why austerity proved so popular with Western political elites following […]
Έσπρωξαν την Ελλάδα στον γκρεμό και γιορτάζουν το γκελ που έκανε στον σκληρό βράχο της Μεγάλης Ύφεσής. Έφτιαξαν μια έρημο και την ονόμασαν ειρήνη – άρθρο στον χτεσινό The Observer
, 27/08/2018
Την περασμένη εβδομάδα οι τίτλοι και τα πρωτοσέλιδα των ΜΜΕ «γιόρτασαν το τέλος της οικονομικής διάσωσης της Ελλάδας, ακόμη και τη λήξη της λιτότητας, ενώ παρουσίασαν την οκταετή παρέμβαση της Ευρώπης στην Ελλάδα ως πρότυπο συνετής ευρωπαϊκής αλληλεγγύης στο “μαύρο πρόβατό” της, μια περίπτωση “αυστηρής αγάπης” που φέρεται να λειτούργησε. Όμως μία πιο προσεκτική ματιά αποκαλύπτει μία […]
Greece was never bailed out; it remains a debtor’s prison and the EU won’t let go of the keys – op-ed in The Observer
, 27/08/2018
Over the past week, the world’s media have been proclaiming the successful completion of the Greek financial rescue programmemounted in 2010 by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Headlines celebrated the end of Greece’s bailout, even the termination of austerity. Buoyant reports from ground zero of the eurozone crisis portrayed Europe’s eight-year long Greek […]
Greece was never bailed out and remains in debtor’s prison – Bild Zeitung interview
, 22/08/2018
BILD meets Yanis Varoufakis – the man who was THE symbol of the Greek left-wing government’s resistance against the targets set by the bailout troika for the broke state of Greece. We met the professor of economics – who co-founded left-wing movement DiEM25 – in his summer house in the mountains of the sunny island of Aegina. BILD: Mr. Varoufakis, […]
Der Spiegel – Verdammt zu 60 Jahren Entwürdingung
, 22/08/2018
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/griechenland-krise-beteiligte-und-betroffene-ziehen-bilanz-a-1221081.html
CRASHED: Long version of my Observer review of Adam Tooze’s new book on the Crash of 2008
, 13/08/2018
Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the […]
Greed, ineptitude and austerity fanned the flames of the Greek wildfire – The Sunday Times
, 30/07/2018
ATHENS: A biblical calamity befell the Attica region last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the tell-tale eclipse-like […]
Behind Greece’s forest fires: a tragic reminder of our collective responsibility as Europeans
, 27/07/2018
ATHENS – A biblical calamity befell Attica last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the telltale eclipse-like daytime […]
Reality & Nightmare: A brief assessment of the Eurozone’s ‘reforms’ – in Der Freitag, Issue 26, 2018
, 19/07/2018
The official version reads as follows: Europe is on the road to recovery, the consequences of Brexit are under control, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron would now create the new foundations on which Europe will establish a stronger alliance. Even the Greek debt crisis, it is said, was over after the decision of the […]
If Trump wants to blow up the world order, who will stop him? op-ed in The Guardian
, 19/07/2018
Even before Donald Trump drove to tears of dismay NATO’s leaders, Theresa May, the EU’s officialdom and Washington’s own ‘intelligence community’, the writing was on the wall: Trump is methodically dismantling a world order that he no longer believes to be in the interests of the United States’ ruling class. Mon 11 Jun 2018 16.23 BST Donald Trump’s early […]
Yanis Varoufakis è un pazzo o un profeta? Il Post, 15 June 2018
, 30/06/2018
Abbiamo passato una giornata con l’ex ministro greco, che alle prossime elezioni europee vuole riunire la sinistra di tutto il continente e rivoluzionare l’Unione Europea di Davide Maria De Luca – @DM_Deluca (ANSA / MATTEO BAZZI «Avete notato come le persone cattive stiano tutte insieme? Salvini, Le Pen, Orban: insieme stanno benissimo». Mercoledì pomeriggio una piccola […]
Profiles in Euro-Denial: The thwarted euro reforms & Greece’s permanent debt bondage – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 28/06/2018
ATHENS – Europe’s establishment is luxuriating in two recent announcements that would have been momentous even if they were only partly accurate: The end of Greece’s debt crisis, and a Franco-German accord to redesign the eurozone. Unfortunately, both reports offer fresh proof of the European Union establishment’s remarkable talent for never missing an opportunity to […]
The Globalising Wall: How Globalisation built walls and divisions. By Y. Varoufakis & D. Stratou, in the Architectural Review
, 20/06/2018
Our theme is a wall. A wall that is neither some ordinary physical structure at a specific site, nor a symbolic wall. It takes a material form in sites around the globe while transcending locations and leapfrogging whole continents as if in a strange quest to globalise itself, to infect our supposedly unifying world with […]
Handesblatt interview: On Germany and Europe’s crisis, 12 June 2018
, 12/06/2018
München941.000 Follower bei Twitter ist in der Währung der digitalen Neuzeit ein Spitzenwert. Für einen Ökonomen ist es ein Rekord. Und so steht Yanis Varoufakis, 57, an diesem Montagabend im nachtblauen Anzug mit nachtblauem Hemd auf der Bühne der altehrwürdigen Münchener Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität und verbreitet Rockstar-Image. Der Rebell des Euro-Systems, für fünf wilde Monate des Jahres […]
The Italian crisis was the Left’s final warning – New Statesman op-ed, 6 June 2018
, 06/06/2018
The Left must adopt a new, credible EU policy agenda: It’s time to explain how the bloc, and the euro, could be run differently, democratically and sustainably Italy’s recent political crisis has at once confirmed the European Union’s unsustainability and the left’s impotence. That the euro is a currency system within which a country like Italy cannot […]
Interviewed by Il Fatto Quotidiano on developments in Italy, Europe and Greece. Here is the original Q&A in English
, 05/06/2018
Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano interviewed me (see here) regarding the latest developments in Italy, Europe and Greece. The original Q&A (in English) follows: Greece is about to exit from the notorious memorandum, the austerity plan signed with the troika. Public finance has improved at a high price for the population as we all know. […]
The terrible prophesies of Brexit – op-ed in literary magazine FIVE DIALS
, 03/06/2018
Brexit rode to victory on the coat-tails of a type of discontent whose power sprang from its insuperable reluctance to specify its nature. Seemingly focused on a foreign power centre that British voters saw (with some justification) as the usurper of their democratic rights, its real focal point was nebulous and imprecise enough to encompass […]
With his choice of prime minister, Italy’s president has gifted the far right – THE GUARDIAN
, 01/06/2018
Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less(excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades. While it is true that Italy is in serious need […]